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With the twin observatories housed inside their shipping containers, the containers are carefully placed onto a custom flatbed truck equipped with special shocks to reduce vibration to the spacecraft and their systems during transport from APL (where they were designed, built and initially tested) to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. There the observatories will undergo additional pre-launch tests.

In this picture the moon can be seen directly above the spacecraft's shipping containers. Once launched the nearly identical twin STEREO observatories will use the moon's gravity to redirect them to their respective orbits, something the launch vehicle alone cannot do. This will be the first time lunar swingbys will be used to manipulate orbits of more than one spacecraft.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory