2007 in spaceflight 2007 in spaceflight The year 2007 contained several significant events in spaceflight, including a Chinese ASAT test, the launches of the US Phoenix and Dawn missions to study Mars and Asteroid belt respectively, Japan's Kaguya Lunar orbiter, and the first Chinese Lunar probe, Chang'e 1. The internationally accepted definition of a spaceflight is any flight which crosses the Kármán line, 100 kilometres above sea level. The first recorded spaceflight launch of the year occurred on 10 January, when a PSLV, launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, placed four spacecraft into low Earth orbit. One of these spacecraft was SRE-1,
Explorer 36 Explorer 36 Explorer 36 (also called GEOS 2 or GEOS B, acronym to Geodetic Earth Orbiting Satellite) was a U.S. satellite launched as part of the Explorers program, being the second of the two satellites GEOS. Explorer 36 was launched on January 11, 1968 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, with Delta rocket. Explorer 36 was a gravity-gradient-stabilized, solar cell powered spacecraft that carried electronic and geodetic instrumentation. The geodetic instrumentation systems included: Non-geodetic systems included a laser detector and a Minitrack interferometer beacon. The objectives of the spacecraft were to optimize optical station visibility periods and to provide complementary data