MESSENGER
NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER)spacecraft orbited Mercury for more than four years. Among its accomplishments, the mission determined Mercury’s surface composition, revealed its geological history, discovered details about its internal magnetic field, and verified its polar deposits are dominantly water-ice. The mission ended when MESSENGER slammed into Mercury’s surface.
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The Emirates Mars Mission aims to draw a clear and comprehensive picture of the Martian climate, which will give scientists deeper insight into the past and future of our own planet as well as the potential of life for humans on Mars and on other distant planets.
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OSIRIS-REx seeks answers to the questions that are central to the human experience: Where did we come from? What is our destiny? Asteroids, the leftover debris from the solar system formation process, can answer these questions and teach us about the history of the sun and planets. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is traveling to Bennu, a carbonaceous…
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The Enceladus Organic Analyzer (EOA) is a novel microchip-based technology enabling analysis of organic molecules in extraterrestrial environments such as that of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
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The Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program—is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging program that maps the four giant planets every year. The program cements the long-term legacy of HST by ensuring a regular cadence of giant planet observations to fill temporal gaps between individual programs. The main goal of OPAL is to study long-term…
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The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission was the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The mission’s goal was to explore the planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with the Sun and solar wind. Scientists are using MAVEN data to determine the loss rate of water and other gases from the…
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Psyche is both the name of an asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter — and the name of a NASA space mission to visit that asteroid. The Psyche spacecraft is targeted to travel to the asteroid using solar-electric (low-thrust) propulsion, following a Mars flyby and gravity-assist. After arrival, the mission plan calls for…
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NASA ESCAPADE is the first UC Berkeley-led planetary mission. Its two identical satellites, Blue and Gold, will provide an unprecedented stereo view of Mars magnetosphere. ESCAPADE will map the ionosphere and space environment to understand how transfer of solar wind energy and momentum through Mars unique hybrid magnetosphere drives atmospheric loss.
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