Spaceflight Now



The Mission




Mission: Venus Express
Rocket: Soyuz-Fregat
Launch: Nov. 9, 2005
Time: 0333 GMT (10:33 p.m. EST on Nov. 8)
Site: Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan



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Tracking hurricanes
This 2005 Atlantic hurricane season has a been a record-breaker. Satellite imagery since June 1 has been compiled into this movie to track the 21 named storms as they formed and traveled, many making landfall.

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Hurricane Wilma
International Space Station cameras captured this incredible video of Hurricane Wilma and its well-defined eye from an altitude of 220 miles. Wilma was packing winds of 175 miles an hour as a Category 5 storm when the station flew overhead.

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The final Titan
America's Titan rocket makes its final launch, blasting off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base to haul a top-secret reconnaissance satellite into orbit.

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Hubble examines moon
NASA has used the Hubble Space Telescope for scientific observations of the Earth's moon in the search for important oxygen-bearing minerals -- potential resources for human exploration. Scientists held this news conference on October 19 to discuss their investigations.

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Saturn's spongy moon
Stunning images of Saturn's moon Hyperion taken by the Cassini spacecraft show a surface dotted with craters and modified by some process, not yet understood, to create a strange, "spongy" appearance, unlike the surface of any other moon around the ringed planet.

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Pluto spacecraft
The Pluto New Horizons spacecraft, destined to become the first robotic probe to visit Pluto and its moon Charon, arrives at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in advance of its January blastoff.

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BY JUSTIN RAY

Follow the countdown and launch of the Venus Express spacecraft. Reload this page for the very latest on the mission.