In 1960, at Cape Canaveral, Pioneer V was launched into orbit around the sun.

CNN: Wednesday,

To reconstruct the meteor's original orbit around the Sun, they used six different properties of its trajectory through Earth's atmosphere.

BBC: Russia meteor's origin tracked down

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.

BBC: Russia meteor's origin tracked down

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.

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This was actually launched in 1998, but it followed a complicated fuel-saving orbit that sent it around the sun and back to Earth, to be slung towards Mars at the same time as the other missions took off.

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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.

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Some galaxies contain black holes with billions of times the mass of the sun, occupying a volume no bigger across than the orbit of Neptune around our solar system but extending their influence through a cosmic bubble 30 million light years across.

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They have measured microwaves as they warped around the sun, studied variations in the orbit of Mercury, and bounced signals off the Moon and Mars.

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