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Rocket booster cams
When space shuttle Discovery launched its two solid-fuel booster rockets were equipped with video cameras, providing dazzling footage of separation from the external fuel tank, their free fall and splashdown in the sea.

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Discovery ferried home
Mounted atop a modified Boeing 747, space shuttle Discovery was ferried across the country from Edwards Air Force Base, California, to Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

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Shuttle tank returned
Shuttle fuel tank ET-119 is loaded onto a barge at Kennedy Space Center for the trip back to Lockheed Martin's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The tank will be used in the investigation to determine why foam peeled away from Discovery's tank on STS-114 in July.

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Delta 4 launch delayed
Launch of the GOES-N weather observatory aboard a Boeing Delta 4 rocket is postponed at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

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Mars probe leaves Earth
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifts off aboard a Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral's Complex 41.

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Launch pad demolition
Explosives topple the abandoned Complex 13 mobile service tower at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. This video was shot from the blockhouse roof at neighboring Complex 14 where John Glenn was launched in 1962.

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Pandora glides along
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE
Posted: August 29, 2005


Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Download larger image version here

 
While close to Saturn in its orbit, Cassini stared directly at the planet to find Saturn's moon Pandora in the field of view. The F ring shepherd moon is gliding towards the right in this scene. The F ring is thinly visible just above the main rings. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.

Near the lower left, some variation in the height of Saturn's cloud tops can be detected. This effect is often visible near the terminator (the day and night boundary), where the Sun is at a very low angle above Saturn's horizon.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is about 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on Saturn and about 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Pandora.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.