Space probes

Pioneer 10

It was launched in March 1972 and was the first probe to cross the asteroid belt.

💡 Did you know? It carries a plaque showing a man, a woman and the position of Earth.

Voyager 1

It was launched in 1977, flew past Jupiter and Saturn and reached interstellar space in 2012.

💡 Did you know? It carries a gold-plated record with greetings in 55 languages, music and sounds of nature.

Rosetta

The ESA probe travelled for ten years and set down the lander Philae on the comet in November 2014.

💡 Did you know? Its name recalls the Rosetta Stone, which helped to decipher hieroglyphs.

Huygens

The ESA lander travelled piggyback on Cassini and sent back pictures of pebbles made of water ice.

💡 Did you know? It is still the most distant landing ever achieved.

Cassini

It orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 and flew through the plumes several times.

💡 Did you know? Beneath the icy crust of Enceladus lies an ocean of liquid water.

New Horizons

It revealed a heart-shaped plain of nitrogen ice and flew past Arrokoth in the Kuiper belt in 2019.

💡 Did you know? It carries some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto.

Galileo

It dropped a smaller probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere and found evidence of an ocean beneath the ice of the moon Europa.

💡 Did you know? In 2003 it was deliberately sent into Jupiter so that it could not contaminate Europa.

Juno

It orbits the planet on long, stretched paths over the poles and studies its interior and magnetic field.

💡 Did you know? Three Lego figures fly on board: Jupiter, his wife and Galileo Galilei.

Mariner 9

A global dust storm was raging when it arrived; afterwards it mapped the planet and found the huge Valles Marineris.

💡 Did you know? The Valles Marineris canyon system is named after the probe.

Viking 1

The landing on 20 July 1976 fell exactly on the seventh anniversary of the first Moon landing.

💡 Did you know? A photo from its orbiter showed a rock that looked like a face, the famous “Face on Mars”.

Venera 7

The Soviet probe landed on Venus and measured about 475 degrees Celsius there.

💡 Did you know? After landing it transmitted for only about 23 minutes, and very faintly.

Luna 3

The Soviet probe developed its film on board, scanned it and radioed the pictures to Earth.

💡 Did you know? Craters on the far side have since borne names such as Tsiolkovskiy and Jules Verne.

Giotto

ESA’s first interplanetary probe came within about 600 kilometres of the nucleus and was struck by dust.

💡 Did you know? It is named after the painter Giotto di Bondone, who painted the Star of Bethlehem as a comet.

Parker Solar Probe

The NASA probe was launched in 2018 and dives through the outer solar corona on its closest passes.

💡 Did you know? It is named after the astrophysicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the solar wind; he lived to see the launch.

Hayabusa

The Japanese probe visited the asteroid Itokawa and returned after seven years with tiny grains of dust.

💡 Did you know? The name is Japanese for “peregrine falcon”.

BepiColombo

The mission consists of two orbiters, one European and one Japanese, which travel together and separate at their destination.

💡 Did you know? It is named after the Italian mathematician Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, who helped plan the trajectory of Mariner 10.