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Parkes Observatory
Parkes Observatory is a radio astronomy observatory near Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, opened in 1961 and known for the Apollo 11 Moon landing broadcast and pulsar research.
Parking orbit
A parking orbit is a temporary low orbit into which a spacecraft is inserted to coast before departing for its destination, such as the Moon or geostationary orbit.
PAS (satellite series)
PAS (PanAmSat) was a geostationary communications satellite series begun with PAS-1 in 1988, the first private challenge to Intelsat, renamed Galaxy or Intelsat in 2007.
Passivation (spacecraft)
Passivation in spacecraft engineering removes stored energy from a vehicle at mission end, by venting propellant and discharging batteries, to prevent explosive breakup and orbital debris.
Payload
A payload is the useful mass a launch vehicle carries for a customer, such as a satellite, spacecraft, cargo or crew vehicle, or other mission hardware.
Payload Operations and Integration Center
The Payload Operations and Integration Center, also known as the Payload Operations Center, is NASA's science mission control center for the International Space Station, located at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Pegasus (British rocket)
Pegasus is a British solid-fuel sounding rocket of the inexpensive Skua, Petrel, and Fulmar family built by Bristol Aerojet for Britain's national upper-atmosphere research program.
Peggy Whitson
Peggy Whitson, born 1960, is an American astronaut who logged a US-record 675 days in space and became the first woman to command the International Space Station, twice.
Peregrine Mission One
Peregrine Mission One was the first Commercial Lunar Payload Services flight, an Astrobotic lunar lander that launched on Vulcan in January 2024 but leaked propellant and never landed.
Perseverance (rover)
Perseverance, a car-sized NASA rover nicknamed Percy, landed in Mars' Jezero Crater in February 2021 to seek signs of ancient microbial life and cache rock samples for return to Earth.
Pete Conrad
Pete Conrad, born Charles Conrad Jr., was an American naval officer and NASA astronaut who commanded Apollo 12 in 1969 as the third person to walk on the Moon.
Peter Diamandis
Peter H. Diamandis (born 1961) is a Greek-American physician, engineer, and entrepreneur best known as founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which created the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE.
Peter Siebold
Peter Siebold (born 1971) is an American aerospace engineer and test pilot at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California, who flew SpaceShipOne above 100,000 feet and survived the 2014 SpaceShipTwo breakup.
Phạm Tuân
Phạm Tuân is a Vietnamese pilot and cosmonaut who became the first Vietnamese and first Asian in space, flying to Salyut 6 aboard Soyuz 37 in July 1980.
Phenolic impregnated carbon ablator
The phenolic impregnated carbon ablator (PICA) is a low-density heat shield material developed at NASA Ames in the 1990s, flown on Stardust, Curiosity, OSIRIS-REx, and Mars 2020.
Philae (spacecraft)
Philae was a comet lander carried by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, and in 2014 it became the first spacecraft to land on a comet nucleus.
Phobos 2
Phobos 2 was a Soviet unmanned spacecraft launched in 1988 to explore Mars and its moon Phobos; contact was lost in March 1989 before its landers deployed.
Pierres précieuses sounding rockets
The Pierres précieuses were a family of French experimental solid-propellant rockets named after gemstones, including Agate, Topaze, and Saphir, that tested techniques for the Diamant satellite launcher.
Pioneer 1
Pioneer 1, also known as Able 2, was a US lunar probe launched in 1958, the first spacecraft launched under NASA, reaching a record altitude before reentering.
Pioneer 10
Pioneer 10, also known as Pioneer F, was a NASA spacecraft launched in 1972 that became the first spacecraft to fly past Jupiter and to leave the solar system.
Pioneer 11
Pioneer 11 was a NASA uncrewed space probe, sister to Pioneer 10, that flew by Jupiter in 1974 and became the first spacecraft to visit Saturn in 1979.
Pioneer program
The Pioneer program was a series of United States uncrewed space missions, running from 1958 to 2003, that made the first visits to Jupiter and Saturn.
Pioneer Venus
Pioneer Venus was a NASA program of two spacecraft launched in 1978: an Orbiter, the first US spacecraft to orbit Venus, and a Multiprobe carrying four atmospheric probes.
Pioneer Venus Multiprobe
Pioneer Venus Multiprobe, also known as Pioneer 13 or Pioneer Venus 2, was a NASA spacecraft that dropped four probes into Venus's atmosphere on 9 December 1978.
Pioneer Venus Orbiter
The Pioneer Venus Orbiter, also called Pioneer 12, was a NASA spacecraft that orbited Venus from 1978 to 1992, mapping the surface by radar and studying its upper atmosphere.
Pixxel Space
Pixxel Space, founded in Bengaluru, India, in 2019 by Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal, operates a constellation of hyperspectral Earth observation satellites and software for analyzing their data.
PK-4
PK-4 (Plasmakristall-4) is a microgravity complex plasma laboratory on the International Space Station since 2014, a joint European Space Agency and Roscosmos project using trapped charged microparticles to study condensed-matter physics at the single-particle level.
Planet 51
Planet 51 is a 2009 computer-animated sci-fi comedy from Spain's Ilion Animation Studios, directed by Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad, and Marcos Martínez, reversing E.T.: a human astronaut lands on a 1950s-style alien world that fears invasion. Budget $70 million; worldwide gross about $105.6 million.
Planet Labs
Planet Labs PBC is an American earth observation company founded in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, operating roughly 200 imaging satellites that photograph the whole Earth daily.
Planetes (プラネテス)
Planetes (プラネテス) is a hard science fiction manga by Makoto Yukimura, serialized from 2000, about working-class astronauts who collect hazardous space debris in Earth orbit.