Missions & Telescopes

Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited overhead.

The International Space Station has hosted a continuous human presence since 2000 through multinational cooperation.

The Space Shuttle flew as the first reusable crewed spacecraft across three decades before retiring in 2011.

Apollo 13's crew survived an oxygen tank explosion en route to the Moon and returned safely to Earth.

NASA's Artemis program aims to return astronauts to the Moon and takes its name from Apollo's twin sister in myth.

Voyager 1 has traveled farther than any other human-made object and carries a golden record of life on Earth.

Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to visit both Uranus and Neptune, and it launched before Voyager 1.

Curiosity has explored Mars since 2012, powered by a radioisotope generator instead of solar panels.

Perseverance searches for ancient microbial life on Mars and carried the helicopter that flew the first powered flight on another planet.

Cassini studied Saturn for over a decade while its Huygens probe made a landing on the moon Titan.

New Horizons performed the first close flyby of Pluto before continuing on to a distant Kuiper Belt object.

Mars Pathfinder delivered the first wheeled rover, named Sojourner, to the Martian surface.

China's Chang'e program has landed rovers on both sides of the Moon and takes its name from a lunar goddess.

Juno studies Jupiter's composition and magnetic field, running on solar power despite Jupiter's distance from the Sun.

The Galileo spacecraft became the first to orbit Jupiter and found evidence of a subsurface ocean on the moon Europa.

Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft through the asteroid belt and carried a plaque describing Earth for any finder.

Hubble's early flawed mirror was corrected on a 1993 servicing mission, after which it captured stunning deep-space images.

The James Webb Space Telescope observes mainly in infrared from a stable point far beyond the Moon's orbit.

Sputnik 1 became the first artificial satellite in orbit, and its 1957 launch helped ignite the space race.

Kepler discovered thousands of exoplanets by detecting the tiny dips in starlight as planets passed in front of their stars.

Chandra observes the universe in X-ray light and is named for astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Falcon 9 became the first orbital-class rocket capable of reflight, with a first stage that lands itself.

Spirit and Opportunity vastly outlasted their planned 90-day missions, with Opportunity running for nearly fifteen years.