Ever since our ancestors began studying the night sky thousands of years ago, humans have longed to explore space. What humanity has achieved over the past 63 years or so has required the dedication, perseverance and imagination of countless people. While many countries have assisted in dozens of tasks beyond earth's atmosphere, NASA is undoubtedly the final player.
In fact, NASA has successfully landed astronauts on the lunar surface, partnered with European governments to explore Saturn's largest moon, and developed space telescopes to capture the far reaches of the universe. While the list isn't intended to outline every major achievement, it will provide some perspective on what the SPACE AGENCy has been able to achieve since its founding in 1958.
NASA was founded in response to the soviet union's successful launch of Sputnik, and over the next decade, NASA raced to bring the United States ahead of its Cold War rivals. Nearly 30 NASA staff members have been killed in various incidents over the years in some serious tragedies, but the space agency remains relentless to continue to pave the way for exploring the world beyond our own.
Apollo 11 landed on the moon
On September 12, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech at Rice University, the United States was already behind the Soviet Union in the space race. To raise public and Congressional support for increasing NASA's budget, Kennedy made a speech announcing that the United States would land on the moon before the end of the decade.
The Apollo 11 mission was launched on July 16, 1969, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Aldrin. Four days later, on July 20, Aldrin and Armstrong landed on the moon through the lunar module. Together they stayed on Earth's lunar surface for 21 hours and 36 minutes.
Three crew members of Apollo 11 landed safely in the Pacific Ocean on July 24. They were picked up by the barge U.S.S. Hornet.
Humanity has finally accomplished a feat that only imagination could have captured before. An estimated 650 million people around the world watched the event live, setting a new record that could not be surpassed until Prince Charles married Lady Diana in 1981.
Traveler No.1
Some nasa missions mainly bring data to be transmitted for several years, while others continue to provide information to scientists for decades. Voyager 1 and its sister spacecraft Voyager 2 are undoubtedly the latter. Voyager 1 was first launched on September 5, 1977, with its main mission to fly over Saturn and Jupiter and transmit images back to Earth for study. More than 44 years later, the spacecraft remained propelled in space until it left our solar system in August 2012. To this day, it still transmits data.
Voyager 1 has a "golden record" containing greetings from Earthlings in more than 55 languages to people from other worlds in the future. The recordings also contain recordings of music from Chuck Berry to Beethoven and various images of Earthlings.
Voyager 1 made many observations that helped map our solar system. The discovery of Jupiter's other two moons (Thebe and Metis), a thin ring around Jupiter, and Saturn's five newly observed moons have altered the known composition of celestial bodies orbiting our Sun.
Hubble Space Telescope
In 1990, the ability to capture images far beyond what telescopes on Earth could achieve was recognized. On April 24 of that year, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery. In orbit more than 300 miles from earth's surface, Hubble has been transmitting images to Earth for more than 30 years.
Hubble has shown Earthlings the beauty and vastness of the world beyond what we see with the naked eye. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, said: "Whatever Hubble reveals — planets, dense star domains, colorful interstellar nebulae, deadly black holes, elegant galaxy collisions, massive structures of the universe — every picture establishes your private vision of the universe." ”
Hubble has been able to maintain functionality in part because various service missions have allowed the space telescope to be maintained and updated. It is reported that the last maintenance task was carried out in 2009.
Mars Pathfinder
As the first robotic probe to land on the surface of Mars, Mars Pathfinder landed on the surface of the Red Planet on July 4, 1997. NASA also noted that Mars Pathfinder far exceeded its expected useful life, transmitting data to Earth until September 27, 1997. During this time, more than 2.3 billion bits of information were transmitted back to scientists on Earth, along with nearly 17,000 images.
NASA released information on another 15 separate soil tests conducted by Pathfinder, in which the surface of Mars was analyzed. The test results show that the surface of Mars was once very wet and warm. Analysis of various rocks and winds on the Earth's surface help to create a better picture of how wind erosion affects the Planet.
This spacecraft consists of two parts: a space lander and a rover. The lander was named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station in honor of the late famous astronomer. The rover itself was named Sojourner, named after the 19th-century abolitionist and civil rights leader Sojourner Truth.
International Space Station (ISS)
The idea of maintaining an orbiting space station and constantly staffing it has been brewing since nasa's plans. But that dream will take years of technological progress and international cooperation to become a reality. On the orders of then-President Ronald Reagan, NASA began working with the Japanese space program and the European Space Agency in 1984. By 1998, this cooperation will develop to include Russia's Roscosmos and the Canadian Space Agency.
Construction began at the end of 1998 and iss was first occupied in 2000. Since then, it has been occupied, sometimes with only three crew members on it.
ISS continues to grow and is improving almost all the time. While crew members perform a large part of these duties, they also take on the task of experiments and laboratory research. These results will help guide humanity towards being able to leave life on earth's surface indefinitely. Learning how to deal with near-weightlessness, exposure to radiation and other dangers of space travel is some of the problems scientists need to overcome before they can achieve this goal.
As of April 2021, 244 people from nine countries have boarded the ISS.
Kepler spacecraft
Kepler is an orbiter launched on March 7, 2009. The main purpose of this spacecraft is to discover and observe exoplanets within the Milky Way. Exoplanets are the names of planetary bodies that exist outside the solar system, and Kepler can detect them by observing distant stars. Kepler looks at stars to see if the light they emit has dropped. The only object large enough to cause a star's light to drop significantly is a orbiting planet.
Kepler was designed to monitor more than 100,000 stars for the presence of exoplanets, and it eventually discovered more than 2,600 exoplanets. Kepler stopped transmitting information to Earth in October 2018, and it has been in operation for more than nine years.
The legacy of the Kepler spacecraft is the sheer number of exoplanets that have been mapped and how many planetary bodies there are in our galaxy that help show scientists knowledge.
Freedom 7 Mission
The former Soviet Union not only successfully launched its first satellite into orbit in 1957 but also beat the United States in sending people into orbit. As Space points out, on April 12, 1961, astronaut Yuri Gagarin flew around The Earth for 108 minutes aboard Vostok-1. Naturally, NASA did not want to lag too far behind the Soviet Union, so it recruited U.S. Navy test pilot Alan Shepard, making it the first NASA astronaut to be sent into orbit. On May 5, 1961, he was sent into space in mercury module (known as Liberty 7).
Although he traveled shorter on suborbital orbit than his Fellow Soviet astronauts, Shepard is recorded in history as the first American to do so. This lifted the spirits of the American people, who saw that the United States still had the ability to compete with the Soviets in the space race.
Shepard became an important figure for NASA and eventually walked on the lunar surface during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971.
Apollo 8
Before NASA can attempt a human landing on the moon, it needs to prove safe doing so. Simulations on Earth can only show so much, and the data and predictions from these efforts really don't tell the story of what a real lunar landing looks like. This is where the Apollo 8 mission came into play.
The Apollo mission, launched into space on December 21, 1968, carried three crew members, namely astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell and William A. Anders. It was the first manned spacecraft to leave on a rocket and the first to observe Earth from a distance.
According to the Smithsonian Aeronautics and Space Agency, the purpose of Apollo 8 was to take the crew to the moon and return, but not to land on the lunar surface. In order to make a real lunar landing, it was first determined that the Apollo program would not only be able to reach the moon but would be able to successfully bypass the celestial body.
By the way, the astronauts aboard Apollo 8 were the first to take images of Earth from lunar orbit. Their stunning photographs are still widely circulated today.
Explorer 1
As mentioned above, the former Soviet government successfully launched the Sputnik space satellite on October 4, 1957, which caused panic in the US government. Knowing that the Soviets also had the capability to fight nuclear war, U.S. government officials foresaw a nightmarish scenario in which their Cold War enemies would dominate the night sky and force the United States to do so.
The U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency wasted no time, sending the satellite into orbit via a Jupiter rocket. On January 31, 1958, Explorer 1 was launched. The satellite orbited the Earth more than 58,000 times before crashing into Earth's atmosphere on March 31, 1970.
With the success of Explorer 1, the space race has reached its climax. The U.S. government immediately built more Explorer satellites, attempting four follow-up launches throughout the year of 1958. Of the five Explorer launched in total, only three left Earth's atmosphere.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched on July 23, 1999. Since Earth itself absorbs X-rays into its atmosphere, Chandra needs to be emitted and located outside earth orbit. After the successful launch, Chandra was known for being the most powerful telescope in the world.
NASA launched the Chandra X-ray Observatory to detect and observe X-ray emissions from some of the hottest events in the universe. According to Chandra, this includes collecting data from stars that have exploded, regions around black holes and galaxy clusters.
There are four sensitive mirrors on the machine that bounce X-rays off an optical platform. Images captured by the observatory include a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the separation of dark matter from normal matter, and the region around the black hole. Chandra was also able to detect black holes throughout the universe, helping scientists begin to map the vastness of the world beyond the naked eye.
space shuttle
Because the cost of single-use rockets affected the U.S. federal budget, NASA scientists began to envision a reusable spacecraft that could safely send astronauts into and out of space. According to Spaceline, the designers proposed their original space shuttle program in late 1969, and NASA hoped to achieve a successful launch by 1977 at the latest.
History tells us that NASA's predictions are somewhat skewed. The first successful space shuttle launch took place on April 12, 1981. On this day, astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen were sent into space aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. The mission marked the first of this special space shuttle until decades later, when disaster struck. On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated while re-entering Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board.
In the course of the so-called "space shuttle era," NASA successfully launched five space shuttles into space. A total of 135 space shuttle missions were carried between the five shuttles, carrying 833 different crew members. The Space Shuttle program officially ended in 2011.
Viking One
July 20, 1976, was the day NASA successfully landed a spacecraft on Mars for the first time. After several failed attempts by the former Soviet Union to land the probe on the Red Planet, NASA's landing allowed the probe to transmit 90 days of data. The Viking probe, however, was able to capture images of Mars for nearly six years.
Before the end of the transmission in 1982, Viking 1 was able to send more than 52,000 images back to Earth for scientists to study. In addition, it has successfully collected and analyzed soil samples from Mars, the results of which are still being analyzed. Scientists hope the photos will give people a glimpse of how humans can fit into life on the Red Planet, with particular emphasis on how food can be grown sustainably.
Sophisticated instruments are also able to record the temperature of the planet's surface at different times of the day and night. The data, along with other materials, was used to help determine how to safely send human astronauts to Mars in the future.
Cassini-Huygens Program
The Cassini-Huygens Project shows what can be achieved when different space agencies pool their resources and knowledge to advance humanity in the age of space exploration. The mission of the work was to explore Saturn and its moons, in cooperation with the European Space Agency, NASA and the Italian space agency of the Italian government. The Cassini-Huygens program focused on Titan, specifically in the hope of discovering what chemical reactions are taking place in the satellite's atmosphere and identifying the sources of the abundant methane on Titan.
The mission consists of two separate spacecraft, the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens probe. Cassini was built to continue orbiting Saturn, and the probe will launch from Cassini so that it can land on Titan.
Overall, the mission is structured to allow the Cassini orbiter and Huygens probe to conduct 27 separate scientific investigations. When the Huygens probe landed safely on Titan's surface in 2005, scientists learned that the moon's surface had the consistency of wet sand and was made up of tiny ice pebbles. The probe also detected carbon dioxide on the ground, which is not found in Titan's atmosphere.
Cassini continued to orbit Saturn until September 2017, when it ended its mission by falling into Saturn's atmosphere and disintegrating.
Juno spacecraft
Understanding what may be the formation of the oldest planet in our solar system is critical to understanding how our own planets formed. Jupiter is thought to have begun when our sun was just born, and it formed when large amounts of dust and gas formed a giant sphere.
Launched on August 5, 2011, the Juno spacecraft is designed to provide NASA scientists with the most in-depth study of Jupiter to date. The mission is to learn more about Jupiter's origins, atmosphere, interior and magnetosphere. Although Jupiter has been observed to be a gaseous sphere, it is thought to have a stable and solid core. According to NASA, testing this theory is an additional goal for the spacecraft mission.
As NASA describes and shares with Phys.org, the spacecraft was built to withstand the massive amounts of radiation emitted from Jupiter. While it has been orbiting the solar system's largest planet, Juno has observed never-before-seen low-altitude lightning and detected water near Jupiter's equator.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Launched in August 2003, the Spitzer Space Telescope succeeded in becoming the first observatory to capture photographs of planets located outside our solar system. These planets are known as extrasolar planets, and images of these objects could not be captured until this mission. Spitzer was able to spot the planet furthest from Earth, orbiting a star nearly 13,000 light-years away. The telescope could also capture a previously unknown ring of Saturn — a cluster of seven Earth-like planets orbiting a distant star — and showed NASA the existence of the most distant galaxy in the universe.
The images taken by spitzer launch are breathtaking. Since 2003, scientists have been able to study detailed photographs showing the weather conditions of some extrasolar planets and others as evidenced by photographs of water vapor on other planets.
The mission, which was originally intended to last two and a half years, has now far exceeded NASA's expectations. It is still in orbit and continues to send photos of extrasolar objects — until the end of funding for the project on January 30, 2020.