Landings On Moons of Other Solar System Bodies
Progress in space exploration has recently broadened the phrase moon landing to include other moons in the solar system as well. The Huygens probe of the Cassini mission to Saturn performed a successful unmanned moon landing on Titan in 2005. Similarly, the Soviet probe Phobos 2 came within 120 miles (190 km) of performing an unmanned moon landing on Mars' moon Phobos in 1989 before radio contact with that lander was suddenly lost. A similar Russian sample return mission called Fobos-Grunt ("grunt" means "soil" in Russian) launched in November 2011, but stalled in low-earth orbit. There is widespread interest in performing a future moon landing on Jupiter's moon Europa to drill down and explore the possible liquid water ocean beneath its icy surface.
Read more about this topic: Moon Landing
Famous quotes containing the words moons, solar, system and/or bodies:
“Since moons decay and suns decline,
How else should end this life of mine?”
—John Masefield (1878–1967)
“Our civilization has decided ... that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“He’s in the other room getting stiffer than the bodies he demonstrates.”
—Philip MacDonald, and Robert Wise. Landlord, The Body Snatcher, directing Gray to the drunken Dr. MacFarland (1945)