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2001
February 12: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous landed on Eros's surface. April 28: After paying the Russian space program $20,000,000, Dennis Tito became the first tourist in space. -
Period: to
Mission to Mars 2001-2010
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2003
February 1: Into the Earth's atmosphere, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on its re-entry. August 25: NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope, the largest-diameter infrared telescope to reach space. -
2004
Virgin Galactic, a private company, accepts reservations for suborbital space flights. July 1: Cassini, the spacecraft, sent photos of Saturn's rings. -
2005
July 3: A NASA spacecraft and a comet that was half the size of Manhattan, New York, collided, which helped scientists study the building blocks of life on earth. July 26: Seven astronauts in Space Shuttle Discovery were launched. -
2006
January 15: Stardust, a NASA spacecraft, returned to Earth safely near Salt Lake City, Utah, with the first dust ever collected from a comet. -
2007
August 4: NASA's Pheonix Mars Launcher was launched. August 8: Barbara Morgan became the first teacher in space since the disaster that happened during 1986. -
2008
January 14: Messenger, the NASA spacecraft, skimmed 124 miles above the planet Mercury. May 25: The Pheonix Mars Lander discovered chunks after a 10 month, 422 million-mile journey. -
2009
March 6: Kepler, the NASA spacecraft, was launched on this day. June 18: NASA launched the LCROSS, which is also known as the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. -
2010
October 10: A private company known as Virgin Galactic announced the successful flight of the VSS Enterprise. December 8: SpaceX, a private company, launched a spacecraft into orbit and back. This is the first non-government business to accomplish this.
