Author: ChaRry MaE PestAnO

VOYAGER 1 & 2
Both of the Voyager missions into outer space have gathered large amounts of data about the gas giants of the solar system, and their orbiting satellites, about which little had been previously known. In addition, the trajectories of the twospacecraft have been used to place limits on the existence of any hypothetical trans-Neptunian planets.
Data and photographs collected by the Voyagers’ cameras, magnetometers, and other instruments revealed previously unknown details about each of the giant planets and their moons. Close-up images from the spacecraft charted Jupiter’s complex cloud forms, winds, and storm systems and discovered volcanic activity on its moon Io. Saturn’s rings were found to have enigmatic braids, kinks, and spokes and to be accompanied by myriad of “ringlets.” At Uranus Voyager 2 discovered a substantial magnetic field around the planet and 10 additional moons. Its flyby of Neptune uncovered three complete rings and six hitherto unknown moons as well as a planetary magnetic field and complex, widely distributed auroras.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program

DAWN EXPRESS Dawn is a space probe launched by NASA on September 27, 2007, to study the two most massive objects of the asteroid belt – the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Currently en route to Ceres and is expected to arrive in February 2015,[2][5] Dawn was the first spacecraft to visit Vesta, entering orbit on July 16, 2011.Should its mission succeed, it will also be the first spacecraft to visit Ceres and to orbit two separate extraterrestrial bodies.
The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, though European partners from the Netherlands, Italy and Germany contributed major components. It is the first NASA exploratory mission to use ion propulsion to enter orbits; previous multi-target missions using conventional drives, such asthe Voyager program, were restricted toflybys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_(spacecraft)

SPACE PROBE ACHIEVEMENTS

Successful Explorations of the Past Years

Space Probes and their achievements

The Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, or NEAR, was the first space probe to orbit and perform an in-depth investigation of an asteroid and then safely land on it. After a flyby and imaging run past asteroid 253 Mathilde in 1997, NEAR Shoemaker began orbiting asteroid 433 Eros on 14 February 2000. The spacecraft returned the highest resolution images made of an asteroid at the time, as well as measuring its size, shape, mass, mass distribution, gravity and magnetic field.
On 12 February 2001, the spacecraft made the first controlled descent to the surface of an asteroid, snapping an incredible series of 69 close-up photos of the rocky surface. After landing, the spacecraft sent back data from the surface of Eros for two weeks.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?MCode=NEAR

Soviet Union Luna 9
Luna 9 was the first spacecraft to achieve a lunar soft landing and to transmit photographic data from the Moon's surface to Earth, preceding the U.S. Surveyor 1 soft lander by about 4 months. The probe also proved that the lunar surface could support the weight of a lander and that an object would not sink into a loose layer of dust as some models predicted. Luna 9 launched on 31 January 1966 at 11:41 UT (14:41 Moscow time) from Baikonur Cosmodrome and reached the Moon on 3 February.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1966-006A
Soviet Union Mars 2 & 3
The Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions consisted of identical spacecraft, each with a bus/orbiter module and an attached descent/lander module.
The primary scientific objective of the Mars 3 descent module was to perform a soft landing on Mars, return images from the surface, and return data on meteorological conditions, atmospheric composition, and mechanical and chemical properties of the soil. Mars 3 was the first spacecraft to make a successful soft landing on Mars.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1971-049F
Japan Hiten
Hiten (originally called Muses-A) was an ISAS (Japanese Space Agency) Earth orbiting satellite designed primarily to test and verify technologies for future lunar and planetary missions. The spacecraft carried a small satellite named Hagoromo which was released in the vicinity of the Moon. Hiten itself was put into a highly elliptical Earth orbit which passed by the Moon ten times during the mission, which ended when Hiten was intentionally crashed into the Moon on 10 April 1993.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1990-007A