New Horizons and Venus Express

Tom's Astronomy Blog has a great post on two unmaned spacecraft exploring planets in our solar system:

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The New Horizons spacecraft bound for Pluto, crossed the orbit of Mars on April 7. At that time, the spacecraft was still closer to Earth than it was to Mars. Due to the location of Mars in its’ orbit, the spacecraft was 58.1 million miles from Earth and 186 million miles from Mars, as shown here.

The next planetary encounter for New Horzons will be with Jupiter. Even at the speed of about 13 miles per second (21 km/sec), it will take the spacecraft until February 28, 2007 to get there.

Of course the mission at hand is the Venus Express. Science Daily is a little exuberant in its coverage with this headline: Probe set to land on Venus; but who can hardly blame them — this is going to be an awesome mission. However, despite the headline from Science Daily, the spacecraft will not be landing on the planet, well that is, if all goes as planned. If all does go well, the space craft will spend 500 days in orbit around the planet; insertion will occur on April 11 2006 at 08:32 UTC.

Image Credits: New Horizons – NASA / Venus Express - ESA

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Ever since I was a little kid, I've been fascinated by space. I hope both of these missions are successful and bring back some great data on our planetary neighbors.