Curated category
Earth flybys
- PROCYONPROCYON, which stands for Proximate Object Close flyby with Optical Navigation, launched into space on the 3rd of December 2014 at 13:22:04 Japan Standard…
- Cassini–HuygensCassini-Huygens hurtled into Saturn's upper atmosphere on the 15th of September 2017 and burned away to nothing, exactly as planned.
- Galileo (spacecraft)On the 21st of September 2003, the Galileo spacecraft was deliberately aimed into Jupiter's atmosphere and destroyed. The probe had spent nearly eight years…
- 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.
- Chang'e 6Chang'e 6 left a hole in the lunar soil shaped like a single Chinese character. Engineers recognized it as 中, zhong, the first character in Zhongguo, China's…
- 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…
- Rosetta (spacecraft)Rosetta was a space probe built by the European Space Agency that, on the 12th of November 2014, placed a lander named Philae on the surface of a comet for…
- MESSENGERMESSENGER hit Mercury at 14,080 kilometers per hour on the 30th of April, 2015. That final, deliberate crash ended an eleven-year journey that had covered…
- BepiColomboBepiColombo is a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, built to study the planet Mercury.
- 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.