... Spacecraft . ... To space by cannon? Finally, the deep space explorers --spacecraft which break away from the Earth's gravity . ... The "Luna" series of the USSR conducted 7 soft landing of unmanned probes, two of them with wheeled robotic "Lunokhods," and two of those missions returned samples to Earth. Others spacecraft have visited the major planets of the Solar system. ... The Mariner series have explored Venus and Mars--and Mariner 10 even reached Mercury, for three separate encounters! ...

... It was designed to observe the solar wind approaching Earth, from a position near the Lagrangian point L1, and it is part of the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) Initiative . ... The original plan called for "Wind" to approach its final station over two years, undergoing two close encounters with the Moon to boost its speed. ... If however the object is moving , the encounter is not symmetric, and in the end the spacecraft may have gained or lost speed, depending on its trajectory. ...

... Voyager Spacecraft Introduction (This Page) . ... The twin Voyager spacecraft, over the course of a dozen years, drew back the curtain on nearly half of the solar system . From launch in 1977 through the spectacular parting shots in 1989 of Neptune at the outer reaches of the solar system, this pair of gangly, instrument-laden spacecraft explored four planets -- Jupiter , Saturn , Uranus and Neptune -- as well as tens of moons, and the rings and magnetic environments of those planetary systems. ...

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,