Curated category
NASA space probes
- Dawn (spacecraft)Harold R. Kaufman built the first working ion thruster in 1959 at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio. This early engine used mercury as its propellant and…
- Voyager 2Voyager 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.
- Cassini–HuygensCassini-Huygens hurtled into Saturn's upper atmosphere on the 15th of September 2017 and burned away to nothing, exactly as planned.
- Voyager 1Voyager 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…
- New HorizonsNew Horizons left Earth on the 19th of January 2006, traveling faster than any human-made object ever launched from our planet.
- NEAR ShoemakerJohns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory built the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft in the mid-1990s. This robotic probe was designed to study asteroid…
- 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…
- Parker Solar ProbeThe Parker Solar Probe is a NASA spacecraft designed to do something that sounds almost absurd: fly directly into the Sun's outer atmosphere.
- 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…
- Deep Impact (spacecraft)A comet-impact mission first appeared on NASA's desk in 1996. Engineers at the agency were skeptical that a probe could hit such a moving target.
- 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…