So proud to see MOM/Mangalayan there. People in India are very proud of achievements of our space agency ISRO. It' one govt owned org that is in the right hands and is doing wonders. Only yesterday, it took heaviest payload by Indian spacecraft and placed 5 UK satellites in Orbit. All this despite being on shoe string budget.
>> Only yesterday, it took heaviest payload by Indian spacecraft and placed 5 UK satellites in Orbit.
Yesterday's launch was the heaviest commercial payload launched by ISRO's PSLV. PSLV has been used earlier to launch more massive Indian payloads (ex: 1.8 tonne RISAT-1). Also, ISRO's GSLV Mk2 and GSLV Mk3 (X-mission) have launched 2 tonne and 3.7 tonne payloads respectively.
I am eagerly waiting for next GSLV Mk2 launch in August, and the reusable launch vehicle technology demonstrator (RLV-TD) in October :)
In the sense of whether it is everything ever launched . . . not even close. It might be an accurate representation of those probes that are still active and in contact with Earth.
Their site says it's a catalog of "the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system and dot our galaxy." Obviously it's not really the "galaxy," per se, considering we only have one probe that's actually left the solar system so far (Voyager 1). There are a number of inactive probes.
Nice website. There are a lot of cool probes in active mode now like New Horizons and DAWN. For the future I think the probe I'm most excited about is Hayabusa 2, scheduled to grab a piece of an asteroid around 2018 and return in 2020.
I wish you could add the distance in light seconds, minutes and hours as well. After reading a lot of SciFi it has become a lot easier to think of the biiiig distances in space in light travel time like 1.25 light seconds vs. 374740 km.
Hubble orbits the Earth. Spaceprob.es seems to be for all current man made probes/landers/etc sent beyond that.
Was going to put last weeks link that neatly showed all the hundreds, if not thousands, of man made objects orbiting Earth, but I can't find it just now (will edit if I do)
"The golden record was curated by Carl Sagan and others in hopes of it one day reaching an extraterrestrial spacefaring civilization."
I'm fairly certain that extraterrestrial life is more aware of our planet than we are ourselves, and have been since the beginning of time. Then again, this is a strictly technology site and spiritual matter is seen as evil and unproven factor in the ecosystem of Earth.
