No particular reason. Awaiting the LRO First Light News Conference, on NASA-TV this afternoon, two things brought the European Space Agency's first lunar orbiter to mind. First, was SMART-1's contribution to "ESA Poster art of the space era, a colourful selection of posters and calendars illustrating the past three decades of ESA missions and programmes, and highlighting activities at ESOC, the European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany." Take your choice of three pages of ESA-flavoured eye-candy, HERE.And many of the presentations from the 2009 National Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) conference at NASA Ames last July have been uploaded, linked to this past summer's agenda. Among them lead investigator Bernard Foing's justifiably proud, "Synthesis of SMART-1 lunar results for future exploration." What an amazing spacecraft it was, too. If you want to see ultimate proof of European advances in miniature science, this mission showed weight is no hindrance to what is still state-of-the-art propulsion and remote sensing experiments. It's worth the download, but this adobe reader file is no light-weight, coming in at 140 mb.
No comments:
Post a Comment