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The Solar Orbiter, launching is 2020.
The “flint” is ferrocerium, a pyrophoric alloy that spontaneously catches fire when fragmented in air.
This Visualization Of The Relative Rotation Rates Of Every Planet Is Fascinating - Digg
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NASA’s colorized visualization of supersonic shock waves
Pics from the Juno probe at Jupiter
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The Vostok “Sharik” descent capsule—a simple but effective cannonball design—that returned Yuri Gargarin and others from the earliest orbital spaceflights. The cosmonaut was ejected at 7,000 meters to parachute to earth; thus some have criticized the Soviet claim to first man—and woman, on the final flight, Vostok 6—in space.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will achieve a heliocentric velocity of 200 km/s (nearly 500,000 mph) and skim just 6.0 million km (3.7 million miles) above the Sun’s surface, far closer than Mercury. It will endure 1400° C behind an innovative carbon-fiber heat shield. In the mission’s two dozen passes through 2025, flybys of Venus will decelerate it to bring its perihelion closer to the Sun. Scheduled for launch July 31, 2018 on a Delta IV Heavy. More details.
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