Lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) is a process for landing humans on the Moon and returning them to Earth. It was utilized for the Apollo program missions in the 1960s and 1970s. In a LOR mission, a main spacecraft and a smaller lunar lander travel to lunar orbit. The lunar lander then independently descends to the surface of the Moon, while the main spacecraft remains in lunar orbit. After completion of the mission there, the lander returns to lunar orbit to rendezvous and re-dock with the main spacecraft, then is discarded after transfer of crew and payload. Only the main spacecraft returns to Earth.
Lunar orbit rendezvous was first proposed in 1919 by Ukrainian engineer Yuri Kondratyuk, as the most economical way of sending a human on a round-trip journey to the Moon.
She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters, the only person to participate on both.
Ride died following a 17-month-long battle with pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012. Shortly before her death, she came out as a homosexual in a statement through her philanthropic enterprise, Sally Ride Science.
This is a composite of images taken of Pluto and Charon during the fly-by of New Horizons on July 14, 2015. The image has been compiled so their relative positions and sizes are correct. Both images were taken by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on the Ralph telescope experiment. The image of Pluto was taken from a distance of 150,000 miles (240,000 km).