61 comments
sph · 7 days ago
> On March 1, 2025, Europa Clipper will reach Mars’ orbit and begin to loop around the Red Planet, using the planet’s gravity to gain speed. [...]

> At Mars, scientists plan to turn on the spacecraft’s thermal imager to capture multicolored images of Mars as a test operation.

The positive thing about space being so large is that the further we go, the more of the neighbourhood we visit to take pictures of (as we need their gravitational assistance in our travels)

standardUser · 7 days ago
I was just browsing these Wikipedia pages to get an idea of the extent of interplanetary exploration:

List of Solar System Probes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_probes

Exploration of the Solar System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_and_exploration_of_t...

The Russian space program, despite having many firsts and many successes, had a huge number of failures early on with interplanetary probes and fell off almost completely by the mid-70's. Meanwhile Europe and Japan, both often viewed as lackluster space powers due to their lack of manned space programs, have contributed massively to solar system exploration.

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braden-lk · 7 days ago
So cool! I worked on this project during my internship at JPL. I’m sure they hucked all my code in the trash as soon as I left, but it was a fun summer. :)

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rhcom2 · 7 days ago
The extension mechanism for the magnetometer looks amazing. Godspeed little probe.

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t1234s · 7 days ago
Will starship make any difference in the speed of these probes or will it just allow much heavier probes to be launched?

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