Courtesy of NASA's National Space Science Data Center . ... The Lunar Orbiter 4 spacecraft was designed primarily to photograph smooth areas of the lunar surface for selection and verification of safe landing sites for the Surveyor and Apollo missions. ... This experiment consisted of a dual-lens camera system designed to satisfy the primary mission objective of providing photogaphic information for mapping and for the evaluation of Apollo and Surveyor landing sites. ...

... The most spectacular view however is from space, where large areas of aurora can be observed simultaneously, even the entire polar cap. ... Such pictures often show a continuous ring of aurora around the polar cap (picture above), caused mostly by electrons leaking out along magnetic field lines, from the plasma sheet of the Earth's magnetic tail. ... Field lines from the auroral oval are believed to lead to the plasma sheet. ... A near-Earth circular polar orbit has many uses. ...

Courtesy of NASA's National Space Science Data Center . Launch Date: 1981-11-04 . Venera 14 landed at 13њ 15 minutes S by 310њ, about 950 kilometers southwest of Venera 13. Surface temperature was 465њC and pressure was 94 Earth atmospheres. Venera 14 carried instruments to take chemical and isotopic measurements, monitored the spectrum of scattered sunlight, and recorded electric discharges during its descent phase through the Venusian atmosphere. ... Space History . ...

Cosmic Research, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 435­488. Translated from Kosmicheskie Issledovaniya, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 453­508. Original Russian Text Copyright © 2004 by Veselovsky, Panasyuk, Avdyushin, Bazilevskaya, Belov, Bogachev, Bogod, Bogomolov, Bothmer, Boyarchuk, Vashenyuk, Vlasov, Gnezdilov, Gorgutsa, Grechnev, Denisov, Dmitriev, Dryer, Yermolaev, Eroshenko, Zherebtsov, Zhitnik, Zhukov, Zastenker, Zelenyi, Zeldovich, Ivanov-Kholodnyi, Ignat'ev, Ishkov, Kolomiytsev, Krasheninnikov, Kudela,