| Title | A Big Day for the ESA: Sentinel Snaps and Exomars Brakes | |
| Date | Monday March 20 2017, @08:27AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the snaps-pictures-and-slows-down dept. | ||
If you're trying to sell something to the European Space Agency, today could be the day to move in and close the deal because there should be smiles all round after two missions achieved important milestones.
[...] Sentinel-B only went aloft last week and is the second of two birds in the Copernicus Earth-observation mission. Publication of the first snap it's sent home is is lovely proof of concept for the satellite's ten-metres-per-pixel resolution and an important step in its three-month commissioning process. The ESA's announcement says the word "Brindisi" translates to English as "toast", as in to toast an occasion with a drink. Your correspondent's ancient history lessons taught that the town was the port from which countless Roman soldiers set out to conquer points East, perhaps also an appropriate evocation for the first photo.
But we digress from the second piece of good news, which comes from Mars where the agency's ExoMars craft has been in orbit since October 19th, 2016. The agency says that in the first week of March the orbiter successfully tested its various instruments and they all checked out.
That's important because for the next year ExoMars is going to be busy lowering its orbit so it can get a really good sniff of Mars' atmosphere. To do so it will conduct a few burns to get closer to Mars' atmosphere and "repeatedly surf in and out of the atmosphere at closest approach, pulling down its furthest point over the course of the year."
In my book moments like this, when humanity's brightest minds come together and achieve something incredibly complex, far outshine every other field of endeavor.
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printed from SoylentNews, A Big Day for the ESA: Sentinel Snaps and Exomars Brakes on 2024-04-19 13:00:34