Read the following article entitled "Space exploration FAQs" taken from a magazine. FAQ stands for frequently asked questions. Before reading the article, try a vocabulary activity.

Space exploration in the new millennium – ten questions you always wanted answered

There seem to be fewer people in space these days. Why is that?
The space shuttle programme has been full of technical problems. More and more money for ever-decreasing returns. Sending unmanned probes seemed to be a good way to go. It captures people’s imaginations without risking lives.

How many space probes have they launched recently?
There have been at least ten big missions in the last three years.

And what are they doing?
They’re looking at our neighbours, the other planets and moons in our solar system, as well as comets.

Didn’t we decide that there was no life on Mars in the 1970s?
That’s right. But the Mars Express has found evidence of ice under the surface. Possibly.  Then there’s the Genesis mission which returned in 2004 after collecting particles of Solar Wind.

Didn’t the capsule get damaged when it came back to earth?
Yes, unfortunately the samples might be contaminated. Deep Impact was quite spectacular, though - the probe that collided with a comet on July 4th 2004 and collected bits of the debris. And in November another probe was launched to examine the greenhouse effect on Venus.

Are they still value for money, all these missions?
Many people asked this question about the space race in the 1960s. But there were many spin-offs: we wouldn’t have had kidney dialysis or ultrasound scanners or the advances in solar energy and weather forecasting. Unmanned space probes are changing what we know about the universe.

How?
We know much more about comets, for a start. And about how our own moon was formed. We can test the laws of theoretical physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity for instance. We also encounter effects that we had no idea existed. Recently a couple of old space probes were found to be departing from their trajectories. This may mean that Newton’s laws of gravity need to be revised!

That sounds a bit suspicious to me. There have been a few controversies, haven’t there?
Well, there was the mission to visit three of Jupiter’s moons. It was cancelled in 2005 when they stopped the funding. And scientists lost contact altogether with the Beagle 2 probe to Mars.  The Cassini Huygens spacecraft to Saturn carries a small nuclear reactor to power it. People were worried about radiation if it had crashed on launch.

And what  happened in 2006?
The capsule from the Stardust mission successfully returned samples of comet dust at the beginning of the year. And a mission to Pluto was launched in February.

And what can we look forward to in the future?
There’s the BepiColombo mission to Mercury in 2013. And with any luck, the Rosetta mission will actually be landing a probe on a comet the year after.

Now complete these sentences which summarise the text.