The Space Shuttle was a partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system that was operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program name was Space Transportation System (STS), taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft of which it was the only item funded for development. The first of four orbital test flights occurred in 1981, leading to operational flights beginning in 1982. In addition to the prototype whose completion was cancelled, five complete Shuttle systems were built and used on a total of 135 missions from 1981 to 2011, launched from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Operational missions launched numerous satellites, interplanetary probes, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST); conducted science experiments in orbit; and participated in construction and servicing of the International Space Station. The Shuttle fleet’s total mission time was 1322 days, 19 hours, 21 minutes and 23 seconds.
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The discovery of a moon for Makemake may have solved one perplexing puzzle concerning this distant, icy object. Earlier infrared studies of the dwarf planet showed that while Makemake's surface is almost entirely frozen and bright, some areas seem to be warmer than other areas. Astronomers had suggested that this discrepancy may be the result of our Sun warming certain dark patches on Makemake's surface. However, unless Makemake is in a special orientation, these mysterious dark patches should cause the ice dwarf's brightness to vary substantially as it rotates. But this amount of variability has not been observed. Tracing our Moon's changing porosity may ultimately help astronomers to track the trajectory of the invading army of a multitude of lunar impactors, that occurred during the Late Heavy Bombardment, 4 billion years ago. Comets are really traveling relic icy planetesimals, the remnants of what was once a vast population of ancient objects that contributed to the construction of the quartet of giant, gaseous planets of the outer Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Alternatively, the asteroids--that primarily inhabit the region between Mars and Jupiter termed the Main Asteroid Belt--are the leftover rocky and metallic planetesimals that bumped into one another and then merged together to form the four rocky and metallic inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Planetesimals of both the rocky and icy kind blasted into one another in the cosmic "shooting gallery" that was our young Solar System. These colliding objects also merged together to create ever larger and larger bodies--from pebble size, to boulder size, to mountain size--and, finally, to planet size.