Curated category
Derelict space probes
- Phobos programThe Phobos program was a Soviet mission unlike almost any before it: two spacecraft, each weighing 2,600 kilograms, launched within days of each other in the…
- Venera 1Venera 1 stood as a cylindrical body topped by a dome, reaching a total height of 2.3 meters. Engineers pressurized the interior to 105 kilopascals using dry…
- Mariner 4Mariner 4 changed what humanity thought it knew about Mars. Launched on the 28th of November 1964, this spacecraft became the first to successfully fly past…
- Pioneer 11Pioneer 11 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 36A at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the 6th of April 1973, at 02:11:00 UTC, riding an Atlas-Centaur rocket…
- Dawn (spacecraft)Dawn, a NASA space probe, launched in September 2007. It carries a memory chip stamped with more than 360,000 names submitted by members of the public…
- Pioneer 10Pioneer 10 left Earth on the 3rd of March 1972, moving faster than any human-made object had ever traveled at that moment.
- NEAR ShoemakerNEAR Shoemaker touched down on an asteroid on the 12th of February 2001, and nobody expected it to survive. The probe had been designed to orbit, not land.
- Stardust (spacecraft)Stardust was a 385-kilogram robotic space probe that launched on the 7th of February 1999 on a mission to do something no spacecraft had ever done: fly…
- Mariner 10Mariner 10 lifted off from pad SLC-36B on the 3rd of November 1973, at 17:45 UTC, carrying a mission unlike any that had come before it.
- Mariner 2Mariner 2 left Cape Canaveral on the 27th of August 1962, and flew for 110 days before passing within 34,773 kilometers of Venus.
- Deep Impact (spacecraft)At 05:52 UTC on the 4th of July, 2005, Deep Impact drove a copper-tipped probe into the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 at more than ten kilometres per second.
- International Cometary ExplorerThe International Cometary Explorer was born with a different name, a different purpose, and a different destination. Launched on the 12th of August 1978 as…
- Pioneer 6, 7, 8, and 9Pioneer 6, 7, 8, and 9 were solar-orbiting space probes launched between 1965 and 1969 on a mission unlike anything attempted before: to stand watch over the…