NOTICE: Because this page had grown so large (~168K), I have split it into 14 pages, including this page for mission acronyms beginning with C and D. Some direct, named links will no longer work. If you are looking for information about a particular mission, please select the appropriate file from the following alphabetical listing. If you cannot find information on the mission you are looking for, you may find some information in the "Pages with Information on Many Missions" section of General Information page.
Cassini, carrying the Huygens Probe, was launched on October 15, 1997 on a Titan IV B Solid Rocket Motor Upgrade (SRMU) with Centaur upper stage from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
See STEDI
Launched August 16, 1984, ended early 1989. One of the three spacecraft in the AMPTE Mission.
Selected in 1997 as the alternate (back-up) ESSP mission. This alternation option was provided with study funding to keep the team together until the two primary missions, VCL and GRACE, successfully completed their Mission Confirmation Reviews.
The second of the four Great Observatories, launched April 5, 1991, on the Space Shuttle Atlantis (shuttle mission STS-37) from the Kennedy Space Center. CGRO reentered the atmosphere June 4, 2000.
Launched July 15, 2000 aboard a Russian COSMOS launch vehicle from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. NASA is providing a GPS Blackjack Flight receiver built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as an Earth Science Enterprise Experiment of Opportunity.
The international comet mission Rosetta will carry two comet landers, Champollion and RoLand. Planned for launch on an Ariane 5 in January 2003.
The Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer (CHIPS) is a UNEX mission, planned for launch from the second stage of a Delta rocket in April of 2002.
The Clark Mission is cancelled. See also SSTI.
See also Clementine-II.
The first Clementine was a joint project between the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (renamed BMDO in May 1993) and NASA. The objective of the mission was to test sensors and spacecraft components under extended exposure to the space environment and to make scientific observations of the Moon and the near-Earth asteroid 1620 Geographos. Clementine was launched on 25 January 1994 at 16:34 UTC (12:34 PM EDT) from Vandenburg AFB aboard a Titan IIG rocket. After two Earth flybys, lunar insertion was achieved on February 21. Lunar mapping took place over approximately two months, in two parts. The first part consisted of a 5 hour elliptical polar orbit with a perilune of about 400 km at 28 degrees S latitude. After one month of mapping the orbit was rotated to a perilune of 29 degrees N latitude, where it remained for one more month. This allowed global imaging as well as altimetry coverage from 60 degrees S to 60 degrees N. After leaving lunar orbit, a malfunction in one of the on-board computers on May 7 at 14:39 UTC (9:39 AM EST) caused a thruster to fire until it had used up all of its fuel, leaving the spacecraft spinning at about 80 RPM with no spin control. This made the planned continuation of the mission, a flyby of the near-Earth asteroid Geographos, impossible. The spacecraft remained in geocentric orbit and continued testing the spacecraft components until the end of mission. See also DSPSE.
I don't have much on this yet. The pages I found were not working when I tried them. The information I've found indicates "preliminary studies for a Clementine II mission have been done by JPL, APL, and NRL, envisioning multiple asteroid or asteroid/comet encounters. No funding has been allocated for such missions."
The four Cluster satellites were destroyed on June 4, 1996, due to the failure of the Ariane 5 launcher. Cluster consisted of a set of four spacecraft to be operated as a single experiment to explore in three dimensions the plasma turbulance and small-scale structures in the Earth's plasma environment. ESA's Cluster II mission consists of four identical spacecraft flying in formation high above the Earth's poles. It is a replacement of the original Cluster mission which was lost in a launch failure during the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 rocket on 4 June 1996. Launches are planned on 12 July and 9 August 2000 using two Russian Soyuz launchers with a Fregat upper stage, provided by the Russian-French Starsem consortium.
NASA's contributions to Geotail, SOHO, and Cluster are referred to as the COSTR Program.
A number of the following (original Cluster) links appear to no longer work, probably due to the loss of this mission.
Launched November 18, 1989.
Now renamed PLANCK.
A Japanese communications satellite, to be launched in 1997.
A Discovery mission.
See Nanosat.
Operated from August 1960 - May 1972. Collected both intelligence and mapping imagery. Number 1 CORONA was the first test launch attempt on February 28, 1959. Number 14 CORONA took its first image of the earth on August 18, 1960. Number 145, the last CORONA, was launched May 25, 1972, and the last images of the series were taken May 31, 1972
COS-B was the first astronomical satellite launched by ESA in August 1975.
These are a long, frequently launched series of Russian military spacecraft. For example, Cosmos 2,305 was launched December 29, 1994.
NASA's contributions to Geotail, SOHO, and Cluster are referred to as the COSTR Program. NASA's GGS and COSTR Programs comprise the United States contribution to the ISTP science initiative.
Launched in 1976 and operated for more than three years. First demonstration of Ku-Band broadcast satellite technology (television application).
Launched March 13, 1994 on the first launch of the OSC Taurus launch vehicle, co-manifested with the US Air Force's STEP-0
.ESA has decided (SSAC decision in May 96) that the Cornerstone 6 mission of its Horizion 2000+ program will be the "interferometer mission". The two options for this mission are an infrared interferometer and an optical astrometry mission. Darwin is the proposed infrared interferometer in space. Its first aim is to detect Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and then to search for a signature of life, ozone in an atmosphere. It utilises the Edison technology for its telescopes.
Launched August 3, 1981. The DE-1 and DE-2 satellites were launched by the same vehicle so that their orbits would be coplanar, allowing occasional two-point measurements along magnetic field lines.
DIGIT was an Explorer concept that predated the NGST studies. I understand that it is no longer being pursued, as it would address a subset of the NGST capabilities.
New line of small planetary and space exploration missions. The six Discovery missions selected so far are NEAR, Mars Pathfinder, Lunar Prospector, Stardust, Genesis, and Contour, . Leading up to the November 1995 selection of Stardust, NASA also studied the Venus Multiprobe Mission and Suess-Urey proposed missions.
Deep Space 1 launched from Cape Canaveral on October 24, 1998 on a Delta 7326-9.5 Med-Lite (first use of this model). See also NMP.
The New Millennium Program's Deep Space 2 mission, consisting of two miniature probes, was launched in January 1999, catching a ride to Mars aboard another spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander. The probes slammed into Martian soil December 3, 1999, but were not heard from. See also NMP.
The official name for the Clementine mission.
Created September 19, 1996. Last update: June 24, 1997 (minor updates as recent as September 6, 2000). Due to changing job assignments, I no longer actively maintain this page, and no one has taken over. I will continue to correct problems on a best effort basis.
Please see my Disclaimer and Web Policy page. Maintained by Gordon Johnston:
Gordon.Johnston@hq.nasa.govThe world wide web uniform resource locator (URL) for this page is:
http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/Sensors_page/MissionLinks/mlcd.html