Its no surprise here at Outer Spice Web Company that we’re space fans.  Just look at the website, our dumb little quotes, etc.  We love keeping up with the Google Lunar X-prize, and the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander challenge.  It’s a great time to be a space enthusiast the private industry is finally seeing value in space markets.  Development and exploration is only going to expand from here on out.  There’s lots of interesting projects going on -Bigelow Aerospace puts up expandable space stations, space tourism with Virgin Galactic, and crazy work being done with the new vasimr plasma rocket engine.  We’re suckers for obscure or just completely awesome space missions.  Here are a few that completely blow our minds.

Hayabusa

Japan didn’t care that no one had ever soft landed and taken off from an asteroid.  They picked an asteroid 500 million kilometers away named Itokawa and took off with their sweet ion engines.  Normally, (well actually only 2 other missions have even attempted to get near an asteroid) you’d just get near a asteroid and scan it or take pictures of it.  Not Japan.  They’re soft landing on it, grabbing some samples and RETURNING TO EARTH WITH THEM!  The first ever asteroid samples are on the way back to the land of the rising sun.

Things didn’t really happen exactly as planned.  There was an actual lander called Minerva that was going to elegantly land and hop around on the surface of the asteroid.  It didn’t get accurate altitude readings so when they let it go, it said “PEACE” and flew away.  It was all good though, Japan had a plan.  They just shot the stupid asteroid with a few ’sample collectors’ (come on, lets call it what it is – SUPER ASTEROID BUSTING GUNZ) and litterally flew threw the resulting dust- sealing up the cargo area and setting course for Earth.  AWESOME.  Lets just hope this doesn’t end with a Zombie apocalypse when we open the hatch.

Cassini-Huygens

With it’s Plutonium power plants, the Cassini-Huygens probe sent off to Saturn and its moons.  The Huygens probe was built to land on one of the moons of Saturn called Titan.  It took 2 and a half hours to get through the thick atmosphere, but miraculously it landed and sent pictures back to Earth.  Titan is the only other planetary body that Humans have found lakes of liquid.  Methane lakes the size of lake Michigan.
Slow down for a second.  This is a moon.  Of Saturn.  We landed on it, took pictures and sent them back.  We’re talking OVER A BILLION KILOMETERS AWAY.  Just check these pictures out- it blows my mind that I’m looking at the surface of a moon off of Saturn…

Venera 13

The Russians sent a probe to Venus called Venera 13.  Venus is kind of a pain to get to, as well as pretty tough to land on.  For instance it’s about 460 degrees on the surface.  CELCIUS.  The atmospheric pressure is around 93 bar, which doesn’t seem too impressive until you realize thats about the same pressure you’d find 1 kilometer under the freaking ocean.

So the crazy Russians didn’t care about the tough environment and sent a probe to the surface.  They took pictures, took readings of all kinds of things and beamed them back to earth.  Pretty ho hum, right?  Oh, did I forget to tell you?  They did this 27 YEARS AGO.  Never mind their country was falling apart, they still scrounged up just enough awesome to pull this incredible mission off.  Kudos to our Ruskie cousins.

We didn’t even go over the vasimir engine, phobos probes, New Horizons, LCROSS, or many other completely awesome space missions.  If you think nothing cool is going on up there, think again friend.