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,
Galileo (spacecraft) it also collected data on Jupiter. "Ulysses" passed by Jupiter in 1992 and 2004 on its mission to study the Sun's polar regions. "New Horizons" also passed close by Jupiter in 2007 for a gravity assist en route to Pluto, and it too collected data on the planet. The next mission to orbit Jupiter was the "Juno" spacecraft in July 2016. NASA's "Juno" spacecraft, launched in 2011 and planned for a two-year tour of the Jovian system, successfully completed Jupiter orbital insertion on July 4, 2016. There was a spare "Galileo" spacecraft that was considered by the NASA-ESA Outer Planets