Family Space Explorers
Stories and robots and astronomy and spaceflight and planets and astronauts and space stations!
Are we nearly there yet?
The NUSTEM team wrote and produced this book just for this project, and you can get your own copy here.
It tells the story of the a future robotic space probe, a rover that will be launched to Mars in 2020. A joint project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russian agency Roscosmos, keep your eyes open for lots more about ExoMars as it develops over the next few years.
Our book describes Little E’s journey. We’ve called her that because she’s not officially been named yet.
STOP PRESS: Little E now has a name – it’s Rosalind Franklin – or Rosie for short!
Cassini-Huygens
Cassini is the spacecraft here, with the Huygens lander tucked inside the cone-shaped thing right in the centre of the image. In January 2005 Huygens was dropped into the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, testing the gases all the way down to the surface.
- Main Cassini-Huygens site
- NASA’s Saturn page, with stunning pictures from Cassini
Philae
Philae was the lander dropped by the Rosetta spacecraft onto the surface of a comet with the snappy name ’67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’, in 2014.
NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
New Horizons
Zooming out to the furthest reaches of the Solar System, New Horizons sent us back astonishingly detailed pictures of Pluto, like the one here.
Spirit & Opportunity
Twin rovers which landed on Mars in January 2004, these amazing robots kept working years longer than the original plan of three months!
Curiosity
The amazing Curiosity is trundling around Mars right now, studying the climate and geology.
- Curiosity rover
- Mars Science Laboratory, the parent project of Curiosity
Images on this page are courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech, ESA/ATG-medialab, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Centre, and NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.
