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( Magellan probe)
The Magellan spacecraft was a space probe sent to the planet Venus, the first post-Voyager unmanned spacecraft to be launched by NASA since its successful Voyager 1 spacecraft to Jupiter and Saturn in 1977. It was also the first of three deep-space probes to be launched on the Space Shuttle (the others being the Ulysses Sun probe and the Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter) until the launching of the failed Mars Observer spacecraft on a Titan III rocket in 1992. It was also the first spacecraft to employ aerobraking techniques to lower its orbit, a technique used on the current series of orbiters around Mars that allows fuel to be conserved. Magellan created the first (and currently the best) near-photographic quality, high resolution mapping of the planet's surface features. Prior Venus missions had created low resolution radar globes of general, continent-sized formations. Magellan, however, finally allowed detailed imaging and analysis of craters, hills, ridges, and other geologic formations, to a degree comparable to the visible-light photographic mapping of other planets. Magellan's global radar map will remain the most detailed Venus map in existence for the foreseeable future, although the planned Russian Venera-D may carry a radar that can achieve the same, if not better resolution as the radar used by Magellan. It was named after the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan was the first planetary spacecraft to be launched by a Space Shuttle when it was carried aloft by the Orbiter Atlantis from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 4, 1989, on the STS-30 mission. Atlantis took Magellan into low Earth orbit, where it was released from the shuttle's cargo bay. A solid-fuel motor called the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) then fired, sending Magellan on a 15-month cruise looping around the Sun 1-1/2 times before it arrived at its orbit around Venus on August 10, 1990. In 1994 it plunged to the surface as planned and partly vaporized; some sections are thought to have hit the planet's surface. Magellan's initial orbit was highly elliptical, taking it as close as 294 kilometres (182 miles) from Venus and as far away as 8,543 km (5,296 mi). The orbit was a polar one, meaning that the spacecraft moved from south to north or vice versa during each looping pass, flying over Venus' north and south poles. Magellan completed one orbit every 3 hours, 15 minutes.
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