Space Exploration
India launched its first Lunar probe, Chandraayan-1, on 22 October, with the spacecraft entering selenocentric orbit on 8 November. On 16 November, the Moon Impact Probe was released, and crashed into the Lunar surface. Although no other spacecraft were launched beyond geocentric orbit in 2008, several significant events occurred in interplanetary flights which had been launched in previous years. MESSENGER conducted flybys of Mercury in January and October, the first spacecraft to do so since Mariner 10 in 1975. Cassini continued to make flybys of the moons of Saturn, including several close passes of Enceladus, one at a distance of 25 kilometres. In September Rosetta flew past the asteroid 2867 Šteins. On 25 May, the Phoenix spacecraft landed in the Green Valley on Mars, where it discovered water ice. Phoenix exceeded its design life of 90 days, finally failing on 10 November. The Ulysses spacecraft, launched in 1990, was also retired in 2008.
Read more about this topic: 2008 In Spaceflight
Famous quotes containing the words space and/or exploration:
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
“Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)