spacetoday.net: space news from around the webin association with SpaceNews


Chinese spacecraft flies past asteroid Toutatis
Posted: Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 11:54 AM ET (1654 GMT)
Chang'e-2 images of Toutatis during December 2012 flyby A Chinese spacecraft originally launched to orbit the Moon flew past and successfully returned images of the near Earth asteroid Toutatis this week. Chang'e-2 passed by Toutatis on December 13, with its closest approach at a distance of only 3.2 kilometers at 3:30 am EST (0830 GMT, 4:30 pm Beijing time) that day. The spacecraft returned several images of the asteroid from the flyby. China launched Chang'e-2 in October 2010 as a lunar orbiter, and it studied the Moon from orbit until June 2011, when it departed orbit to travel to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, making it the first Chinese spacecraft to travel beyond the vicinity of the Moon. The spacecraft left L2 earlier this year to make a flyby of Toutatis.
<<previous article   next article>>
news in brief
First Terran 1 launch fails to reach orbit
Posted: Sat, Mar 25 11:25 AM ET (1525 GMT)

Soyuz launches Russian military satellite
Posted: Sat, Mar 25 11:23 AM ET (1523 GMT)

China launches weather satellites
Posted: Sat, Mar 25 11:22 AM ET (1522 GMT)

news links
Friday, March 31
Virgin Orbit burns up in uncontrolled descent
TechCrunch — 5:22 am ET (0922 GMT)


about spacetoday.net   ·   info@spacetoday.net   ·   mailing list