In 1960, at Cape Canaveral, Pioneer V was launched into orbit around the sun.
Soon, however, the object's motion suggested it was in an orbit around the Earth.
So most dust now in orbit around earth can be assumed to be man-made.
Near's encounter with Eros is its second chance to go into orbit around the rock.
The 27-year-old Gagarin made a single orbit around the planet and the possibilities for humankind changed overnight.
Therefore, it's likely these stars still have material in orbit around them in the form of terrestrial-type bodies.
"We will be able to watch atoms circulate in close orbit around a black hole, " said Dr. Harrison.
To reconstruct the meteor's original orbit around the Sun, they used six different properties of its trajectory through Earth's atmosphere.
The satellite itself and the rocket that carried it into orbit around Earth were built by Orbital Sciences Corp.
Once the bullet is free of the atmosphere, which happens a few hundred kilometers up, it follows an elliptical orbit around Earth.
On Oct. 4, 1957, a primitive, 100-pound metal ball was sent hurtling into orbit around Earth, beeping back radio signals like taunts.
In October 1957 the Soviets managed to hoist a 184-pound hunk of metal with a radio transmitter into orbit around the Earth.
Within five to 10 years, however, the company expects to progress from selling observation platforms in orbit around Earth to prospecting services.
Using amateur video footage, they were able to plot the meteor's trajectory through Earth's atmosphere and then reconstruct its orbit around the Sun.
Their simulations included the effects of eclipses and tidal heating on climate for an earth-twin in orbit around a Jupiter-like gaseous giant planet.
FORBES: Earth-Like Exo-Moons Can Lurk Well Beyond Planetary Habitable Zones, Say Astronomers
NEAR-Shoemaker began its yearlong orbit around Eros on February 14 and currently circles the asteroid from a distance of 31 miles (50 km).
On February 14th, St Valentine's day, one of its craft went into orbit around an asteroid called Eros amid much over-rehearsed, toe-curling humour.
But could there be intelligent life in another planetary system, in orbit around one of the 100 billion other stars in our Milky Way galaxy?
Which is why Mr Robinson and others believe that the picosats currently in orbit around the earth will be the shape, and size, of things to come.
In addition, Messenger will use this lap around Mercury to help put the spacecraft on a trajectory to help it return to orbit around the planet permanently by 2011.
The other way of doing things is for the company to retrieve smaller asteroids, put them into orbit around Earth or the moon, and then dissect them at its leisure.
Mr Obama was not yet born in 1957, when the Soviet Union put the first satellite in orbit around the Earth, but the moment is remembered as a salutary shock to an America grown complacent.
It could mean they gain control of the spacecraft systems and can fire the engines, but after the orbit around Earth has dropped so low that there is not enough fuel to go to Phobos.
Mars Express went into an initial orbit around Mars at about the time that Beagle 2 was landing, and it is now being manoeuvred into an operational orbit that will take it over both poles.
ECONOMIST: The current crop of Mars missions has got off to a bad start
At about the same time, a team of professional astronomers was pulling off a similar trick for a planet the size of Jupiter in orbit around a star 32m times farther from Earth than the sun.
ECONOMIST: Astronomers may have found their first Saturn lookalike
Images sent back from the Cassini spacecraft (which has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004) have revealed how the fine structure of the rings is broken up into intricate patterns of thousands of ringlets and gaps.
The work, which is described in the journal Nature, actually draws on observations made by several astronomical facilities, including the Keck and James Clerk Maxwell telescopes in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the Earth.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Deepest X-rays tell merger story
It was a delta-v opposite to the direction of travel and that slowed Messenger enough so the relatively weak gravity of Mercury could capture the spacecraft and put it into an elliptical orbit around the planet rather than the Sun.
In their paper, the co-authors argue that gravitational tidal heating caused by the gravitational friction of an earth-like exo-moon on an eccentric orbit around a Jupiter-like planet lying at a Jupiter-like distance from its parent star, could, in fact, create habitable conditions.
FORBES: Earth-Like Exo-Moons Can Lurk Well Beyond Planetary Habitable Zones, Say Astronomers
Similarly in 1992 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) put forward the idea of launching 55, 000 "solar sails" into orbit around the Earth, each with an area of 100 square kilometers, the sails collectively producing the same effect as Early's single glass panel.
CNN: The shield of Ra: Could solar reflection save the planet?
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