![]() ![]() The first minor planet to be discovered was Ceres in 1801. ![]() As of May 2022, there are 1,131,201 known objects, divided into 611,678 numbered (secured discoveries) and 519,523 unnumbered minor planets, with only five of those officially recognized as a dwarf planet. Minor planets include asteroids ( near-Earth objects, Mars-crossers, main-belt asteroids and Jupiter trojans), as well as distant minor planets ( centaurs and trans-Neptunian objects), most of which reside in the Kuiper belt and the scattered disc. Before 2006, the IAU officially used the term minor planet, but that year's meeting reclassified minor planets and comets into dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies (SSSBs). This will grant several more years to contribute to the ESA's Mars research and observational initiatives.Euler diagram showing the types of bodies in the Solar System according to the IAUĪccording to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a minor planet is an astronomical object in direct orbit around the Sun that is exclusively classified as neither a planet nor a comet. The most recent extension was approved in March 2023 and is set to remain active until December 2026. The durability of the craft and the versatility of its instrumentation have led to several mission extensions for the orbiter. Over the course of its two-decade orbit around the Red Planet, the mission has identified methane in the planet's atmosphere, discovered ice at both of its poles, and even detected a potential salty lake beneath the planet's south pole. The repurposing of the camera, along with its other existing instrumentation, has reaped substantial benefits for the Mars Express team. It was then reactivated in 2007 to serve as an educational, outreach, and observational tool. However, after the lander's failed deployment, the camera was briefly turned off. The VMC was originally designed as an engineering instrument to document the Beagle 2 lander's separation. The broadcast on June 2nd captivated viewers with an hour of real-time images captured by the probe's Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC). Over the past several months, they have been developing and preparing the tools needed to make the livestream possible. Fortunately, the Mars Express team identified new ways to repurpose the craft's existing instruments. One of the challenges of managing equipment located 186 million miles away is the difficulty in adding or modifying its functionality. The orbiter, however, safely reached its destination and began providing ESA researchers with valuable high-resolution imaging and mineralogical mapping of Mars' surface. ![]() Unfortunately, the Beagle-2 lander failed to deploy properly in December 2003 and was later discovered by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to be intact but inoperable. The orbits of the two planets had brought them closer together than they had been in more than 60,000 years. The spacecraft, consisting of the orbiter and the Beagle-2 lander, was dubbed "Express" due to the close proximity between Earth and Mars at the time of its launch. ![]() Twenty years and several mission extensions later, ESA celebrated the spacecraft's anniversary with the first-ever "livestream from Mars," beaming near-real-time images of our planetary neighbor from over 186 million miles away. The mission's original objective focused on the search for subsurface water from its orbit around the Red Planet. Why it matters: Launched in 2003, the Mars Express orbiter made history as the first true planetary mission of the European Space Agency (ESA). ![]()
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