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Curated playlist

Jet Propulsion Laboratory space probes

  • Dawn (spacecraft)10 minDawn, 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, mounted just above one of its ion thrusters. It became the first spacecraft to orbit…
  • Voyager 111 minVoyager 1 is a machine the size of a small car, and right now it is the most distant human-made object from Earth. At a distance of more than 172 AU from home, its radio signals take over 23 hours to cross the void before they reach a…
  • Voyager 210 minVoyager 2 left Earth on the 20th of August 1977, riding a Titan IIIE/Centaur rocket out of Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was aimed at the outer Solar System, carrying a mandate no single spacecraft had attempted…
  • Cassini–Huygens16 minCassini-Huygens hurtled into Saturn's upper atmosphere on the 15th of September 2017 and burned away to nothing, exactly as planned. It had spent nearly 20 years in space, 13 of them in Saturn's orbit, and NASA's Planetary Science Division…
  • Viking program9 minThe Viking program landed spacecraft on Mars in 1976, and for the next quarter-century it supplied nearly everything humanity knew about the red planet. Two identical probes, Viking 1 and Viking 2, each carried an orbiter and a lander,…
  • Galileo (spacecraft)10 minOn the 21st of September 2003, the Galileo spacecraft was deliberately aimed into Jupiter's atmosphere and destroyed. The probe had spent nearly eight years orbiting the solar system's largest planet. Its destruction was not a malfunction.…
  • Mars Exploration Rover12 minMars Exploration Rover was a NASA mission that sent two robots, Spirit and Opportunity, to the surface of Mars in January 2004, with a plan for each to last exactly 90 Martian solar days. Spirit survived more than six years. Opportunity…
  • Stardust (spacecraft)11 minStardust 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 through the coma of a comet, scoop up dust grains traveling at over 1,000 miles per…
  • Rosetta (spacecraft)12 minRosetta 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 the first time in human history. That comet was 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a…
  • Deep Impact (spacecraft)12 minAt 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. The spacecraft had crossed 429 million km in 174 days to reach that single moment. No…

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