Curated category
NASA space probes
- 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…
- 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 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…
- 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)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…