Spacecraft and deep-space probes

These are drawn from real mission ephemeris, not artists’ impressions. Voyager 1 is where Voyager 1 actually is — far beyond the planets, its radio signal taking most of a day to reach Earth.

Open any probe to see how far it has travelled, where it is heading, and the route that took it there.

Spacecraft and deep-space probes — all 46 objects

• Apollo 11 · Columbia — The first crewed lunar landing, replayed against the true Earth–Moon geometry of July 1969.
• Eagle (LM) — “The Eagle has landed.” The lunar module rides the rotating Moon at Tranquility Base — its position here is…
• BepiColombo — A joint Europe–Japan mission threading repeated planet flybys to brake into orbit and unravel scorched…
• Cassini — Cassini orbited Saturn for thirteen years before its “Grand Finale” dive into the planet, transforming our…
• Chandra X-ray Observatory — NASA’s flagship X-ray telescope rides a long, looping orbit a third of the way to the Moon, seeing the…
• Curiosity — NASA’s car-sized rover showed that Gale crater once held a lake that could have supported microbial life…
• DART — NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test was the first planetary-defence trial: it rammed the small moonlet…
• Dawn — Powered by whisper-quiet ion engines, Dawn was the first craft ever to orbit two different worlds: the giant…
• DSCOVR — DSCOVR keeps a constant watch on the solar wind for space-weather warnings, while photographing Earth’s full…
• Euclid — ESA’s survey telescope is imaging billions of galaxies across a third of the sky, building a 3D map of how…
• Europa Clipper — NASA’s largest planetary spacecraft will make dozens of daring flybys of Europa to probe the vast salt-water…
• Gaia — ESA’s star surveyor measured the precise positions of nearly two billion stars to build the richest 3D map…
• Galileo — The first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter, Galileo revealed a likely ocean inside Europa before being…
• Hayabusa2 — After delivering its Ryugu samples to Earth, JAXA’s Hayabusa2 sails onward to rendezvous with a…
• Hera — ESA’s follow-up to DART will survey Dimorphos and the crater DART left behind, measuring exactly how well a…
• Hope (Emirates Mars Mission) — The Arab world’s first interplanetary mission, Hope flies a wide 20,000–43,000 km orbit that lets it watch…
• Hubble Space Telescope — Orbiting above the blurring atmosphere since 1990, Hubble has helped pin down how fast the Universe is…
• International Space Station (ISS) — Humanity’s outpost in orbit, continuously crewed since November 2000. It circles Earth every 93 minutes…
• JUICE — ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer will ultimately orbit Ganymede — the first spacecraft ever to circle a moon…
• Juno — NASA’s solar-powered orbiter loops over Jupiter’s poles, peering beneath the cloud tops to map the giant’s…
• James Webb Space Telescope — A 6.5-metre golden eye parked beyond the Moon at the L2 point, watching the first galaxies ignite.
• Kepler — Kepler stared at one patch of sky for four years, catching the tiny dips in starlight as planets crossed…
• Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — LRO has mapped the Moon in dazzling detail, scouting future landing sites and even spotting the old Apollo…
• Lucy — Lucy is on a twelve-year tour to visit a record number of Trojan asteroids — fossils of the planet-building…
• Mars Express — ESA’s first Mars mission has circled the Red Planet for over two decades, radar-sounding for buried water…
• MAVEN — MAVEN sniffs the upper Martian atmosphere to learn how the planet lost its air — and its oceans — to space…
• MESSENGER — The first spacecraft to orbit Mercury circled the planet 4,104 times and found water ice hiding in its…
• Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — MRO’s powerful HiRISE camera resolves boulders on the Martian surface while relaying data home from the…
• New Horizons — Gave humanity its first close look at Pluto in 2015, revealing nitrogen glaciers and a heart-shaped plain.
• Mars Odyssey — The longest-working spacecraft at Mars: Odyssey mapped the planet’s ice and minerals and still relays…
• OSIRIS-APEX — Reborn from OSIRIS-REx after dropping its Bennu sample to Earth, the probe now chases Apophis to study the…
• Parker Solar Probe — The fastest object humanity has ever built, screaming past the Sun at up to 690,000 km/h and flying through…
• Perseverance — Perseverance has explored the ancient river delta and rim of Jezero crater, sealing rock cores in tubes for…
• Pioneer 10 — The first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt and fly past Jupiter. Contact was lost in 2003; it now…
• Pioneer 11 — First to fly past Saturn, threading between the planet and its rings in 1979. Its signal fell silent in…
• Psyche — Psyche cruises toward a giant metal-rich asteroid that may be the exposed iron core of a shattered baby…
• Rosetta — Rosetta chased down and orbited a comet, dropped the Philae lander onto its surface, then gently…
• SOHO — The Sun-watching veteran has guarded against solar storms for three decades and stumbled onto thousands of…
• Solar Orbiter — This ESA/NASA probe swoops inside Mercury’s orbit to capture the closest images of the Sun ever taken — and…
• Spitzer Space Telescope — NASA’s infrared telescope peered through cosmic dust for 16 years, from newborn stars to distant galaxies.
• STEREO-A — One of NASA’s twin solar observatories, STEREO-A circles the Sun slightly faster than Earth, drifting around…
• ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter — TGO hunts for trace methane and other gases that might hint at life or active geology hidden beneath the…
• Ulysses — A joint ESA–NASA mission that used Jupiter’s gravity to climb out of the plane of the planets and became the…
• Voyager 1 — Launched in 1977 with a golden record of Earth’s sounds, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012.
• Voyager 2 — The only spacecraft ever to fly past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2 entered interstellar…
• Zhurong — China’s first Mars rover, carried by the Tianwen-1 mission, probed the plains of southern Utopia Planitia…

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