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 49 Explorer 49 Explorer 49 (also called Radio Astronomy Explorer-B(RAE-B)) was a 328 kilogram satellite launched on June 10, 1973 for long wave radio astronomy research. It had four 230-meter long X-shaped antenna elements, which made it one of the largest spacecraft ever built. "Explorer 49" was launched after the termination of the Apollo program, and although it did not examine the Moon directly, it became the last American lunar mission until the launch of Clementine spacecraft in 1994. This mission was the second of a pair of Radio Astronomy Explorer (RAE) satellites, "Explorer 38" or RAE-A being the first. "Explorer