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Loading contentThe critical interaction with the surface — a touchdown, a landing, a sample-collection manoeuvre, or a deliberate impact.
mission_phase:surface-operationsDataset membership
Open data
In the graph export: graph.json · graph.jsonld
Planned API: GET /api/v0/entities/mission_phase:surface-operations
Scientific entity. See the evidence framework and authority dashboard.
How Surface Operations & Sampling connects across Asteria Star — scientific, cultural, and astrological links are kept separate.
Extended operations close to the body — global mapping, orbiting, and selecting sites for a landing, sampling, or impact.
For sample-return missions, the journey home and the high-speed atmospheric reentry of the capsule to a recovery site — the phase that delivers the science to Earth.
Hayabusa2 collected surface and subsurface samples of the asteroid Ryugu and returned them to Earth.
DART was the first planetary-defence test, deliberately impacting the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos to change its orbit.
How crews range across a world beyond the walking distance of their habitat — from unpressurised buggies for short trips to pressurised rovers that serve as mobile homes for days-long expeditions. Mobility multiplies the science a surface mission can do, turning a single landing site into a region to explore.
The problem of setting a heavy crewed vehicle down safely on Mars. The atmosphere is thick enough to fiercely heat an incoming craft yet too thin to slow a massive lander by parachute alone, so landing humans will demand a combination of heat shields, retropropulsion, and technologies well beyond those that delivered the robotic rovers.
The final approach, when the target grows from a point of light into a resolved world and the spacecraft measures its shape, spin, and gravity to plan operations.
The launch and the long interplanetary cruise to the target, often using gravity assists or ion propulsion to reach a distant small body.
Extended operations close to the body — global mapping, orbiting, and selecting sites for a landing, sampling, or impact.
For sample-return missions, the journey home and the high-speed atmospheric reentry of the capsule to a recovery site — the phase that delivers the science to Earth.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.
Japanese missions (Hayabusa, Akatsuki) and space science.