---

• n  a craft capable of traveling in outer space; technically, a satellite around the sun

• We can imagine a spacecraft carrying a big area of thin film to collect solar energy, with an ion-jet engine to produce thrust powerful enough to boost a spacecraft to a speed of .
• The spacecraft now has about three months to study the Martian north pole before -200 F winter temperatures hit the region and threaten to freeze the instruments.
• Operating a satellite at a distance ten times beyond anything they had done before has given the ISRO valuable experience in hi-tech spacecraft, rocketry and advanced remote .

• ballistic capsule
• space vehicle

News & Articles

---

• Why Spacecraft of the Future Will Be Packed With Microfluidics
  Microfluidics deals with manipulating very tiny amounts of liquid in channels the width of a human hair as they snake across a microchip. Advances in this field mean that future robotic spacecraft - constrained by mass and volume - will be able to carry an entire "lab on a chip" and conduct important experiments far from the Earth.        
  June 21, 2013 - Wired News
• New Horizons Spacecraft ‘Stays the Course’ for Pluto System Encounter
  Following an intense 18 month study to determine if NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft faced potentially destructive impact hazards during its planned 2015 flyby of the Pluto binary planet system, the mission team has decided to ‘stay the course’ – and stick with the originally planned trajectory because the danger posed by dust and debris is [...]
  June 21, 2013 - Universe Today
• Cassini spacecraft to take our global photo next month
  Cassini, NASA spacecraft orbiting Saturn, will take a picture of Earth next month, from a distance of about a billion miles.
  June 19, 2013 - The Christian Science Monitor

Quotes

---

• Barack Obama in Space.com
  By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space,President Obama said. "We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in...
• Gen James E Cartwright in Leading The Charge
  This is the first time we've used a tactical missile to engage a spacecraft,Cartwright said.
• Fuk Li in AFP
  The Phoenix spacecraft succeeded in its investigations and exceeded its planned lifetime,said Fuk Li, manager of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.