Deep Space Probes

For a comprehensive and up-to-date list of deep space craft, visit NASA's Solar System Exploration Missions page.

NOTE: This page is no longer maintained. I created this page as a result of a discussion with Larry Kellogg. I thought it was a neat idea, and I maintained it for quite a while afterwards, but it is nowadays superseded by far better resources.

Even as you read this, there are several man-made probes serving as our remote eyes throughout the Solar System. Some perform useful and valuable observations on a daily basis, such as the Solar and Heliocentric Observatory, monitoring the Sun 24 hours a day. Others are living relics from the dawn of space exploration, including the longest-living space probe ever made, NASA's Pioneer 6. Well, maybe this isn't exactly Arthur C. Clarke's vision of the year 2001, with a nuclear-powered manned spaceship en route towards Jupiter, but we are getting there... at least some of our faithful remote outposts are out there already, as a first step towards what I hope will be our eventual conquest of the Solar System and beyond.

These pages provide summary information on all "live" probes that operate away from the immediate vicinity of the Earth. In other words, probes that are either going somewhere, or are "looking up", not down.

Please note that this 'portal' is the result of the efforts of one person who's not in any way associated with the space agencies whose missions are featured here. One consequence is that the information is not always up-to-date. For instance, the 'Last reported contact' field contains information about the last contact I heard about (from an e-mail newsletter, a visit to the probe's Web site, etc.) and if it shows a date months in the past, that doesn't necessarily mean that the probe has not been heard from by its operators in the intervening time!

Return visitors may have noticed that the appearance of this page has changed. I believe the new format is more easily readable (no more tables twice as wide as your screen), and it also made it easier for me to switch to a database-driven version of this page.

Deep Space Probes

Planetary probes have a specific mission: to explore the surface or vicinity of a planet in the Solar System. Not surprisingly, Mars remains the most popular target. Other deep space probes explore the Sun, other planets, or are on their way out of the Solar System.

Lunar Probes The last Apollo landed on the Moon over 30 years ago, but our satellite has not been completely abandoned.
	Probe Name	Date of launch	Current Location	Mission description	Last reported contact	Current status	Live telemetry	Project home page	Comments
	Chandrayaan-1	2008-10-22	Lunar orbit	Lunar mapping	2009-08-28	Ceased operations due to star sensor failure		Indian Space Agency
	Chang'e 2	2010-10-01	Lunar orbit	Lunar exploration	Daily	Normal		China National Space Administration
	Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite	2009-06-19	Elongated Earth orbit	Lunar impact	2009-10-09	Destroyed by planned lunar impact		NASA Ames
	Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter	2009-06-19	Lunar polar orbit	Lunar survey	Daily	Normal		NASA GSFC

Mars Probes Many deep space probes have been launched in recent years with a specific mission: to explore the Red Planet.
	Probe Name	Date of launch	Current Location	Mission description	Last reported contact	Current status	Live telemetry	Project home page	Comments
	Mars Express	2003-06-02	Martian orbit	Lander, orbiter	Daily	No contact with lander		European Space Agency
	Mars Odyssey	2001-04-07	Martian orbit	Mapping chemical elements	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL
	Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter	2005-08-12	Martian orbit	Mars exploration	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL
	MER-A "Spirit"	2003-06-10	Gusev crater	Mars exploration rover	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL
	MER-B "Opportunity"	2003-07-07	Meridiani Planum	Mars exploration rover	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL
	Planet-B (Nozomi)	1998-07-04	Solar orbit	Solar system observations	2003-12-09	Failed to achieve Martian orbit		Japanese Space Agency	Designed to orbit Mars; mission altered due to excessive propellant loss and equipment failure

Other Planetary Probes Other planets are also targeted. Galileo recently finished its mission at Jupiter; Saturn is about to be investigated by Cassini, and hopefully, more probes will be under way in the near future.
	Probe Name	Date of launch	Current Location	Mission description	Last reported contact	Current status	Live telemetry	Project home page	Comments
	Cassini	1997-10-15	Saturnian orbit	Exploring the Saturn system	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL	Huygens probe landed successfully on Titan
	Messenger	2004-08-02	En route to Mercury	Exploring Mercury	Daily	Normal		Johns Hopkins University
	Venus Express	2005-11-09	In Venutian orbit	Venus orbiter	Daily	Normal		ESA

Interplanetary Probes Other probes are studying the Solar System, or are on their way towards non-planetary targets. Some, like the early Pioneers, have long outlived their planned lifetimes but they just refuse to die; the engineering marvel called Pioneer 6 has been transmitting faithfully for over 35 years! (Design lifetime: 6 months.)
	Probe Name	Date of launch	Current Location	Mission description	Last reported contact	Current status	Live telemetry	Project home page	Comments
	Dawn	2007-09-27	Solar orbit	Investigate Ceres and Vesta	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL
	Deep Impact / EPOXI	2005-01-12	Solar orbit	Comet impact mission	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL	Impact mission completed; spacecraft remains in usable trajectory, pending proposals for further use.
	Muses-C (Hayabusa)	2003-09-05	on Earth	Asteroid sample return	2010-06-14	Sample return capsule successfully recovered		Japanese Space Agency
	Planet-C (Akatsuki)	2010-05-20	En route to Venus	Venus exploration	Daily	Normal		Japanese Space Agency
	Rosetta	2004-03-02	En route to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko	Comet orbiter and lander	Daily	Normal		European Space Agency
	Stardust	1999-02-07	Solar orbit	Comet and interstellar dust collection	2006-01-30	Hibernation		NASA JPL	Successful sample return; spacecraft remains in orbit
	Ulysses	1990-10-06	Solar polar orbit	Exploring the Sun's polar regions	2009-06-30	Ceased operations		European Space Agency

Interstellar Probes Some of our live space probes are actually leaving the solar system. The two Voyagers and the two no longer functional Pioneers are all much farther from the Sun than Pluto, serving as our first messengers to the stars.
	Probe Name	Date of launch	Current Location	Mission description	Last reported contact	Current status	Live telemetry	Project home page	Comments
	Voyager 1	1977-09-05	Outer solar system (~81 AU)	Outer solar system exploration	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL
	Voyager 2	1977-08-20	Outer solar system (~65 AU)	Outer solar system exploration	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL

Space-Based Observatories

Several space probes are presently in heliocentric "halo" orbits. Some are Sun-observing, while others are en route to non-planetary targets. Yet more observatories are Earth-orbiting satellites, but instead of looking back down on our planet, they are looking "up".

Observatories in Halo Orbits Especially well suited for solar observation are orbital locations at the so-called Sun-Earth Lagrange points. Probes located near these positions remain at a fixed position relative to both the Earth and the Sun.
	Probe Name	Date of launch	Current Location	Mission description	Last reported contact	Current status	Live telemetry	Project home page	Comments
	ACE	1997-08-25	Sun-Earth Lagrange point L1	Solar wind composition analysis	Daily	Normal		California Institute of Technology
	Fermi	2008-06-11	L2 Lagrange Point	Gamma ray astronomy	Daily	Normal		NASA GSFC
	Herschel	2009-05-14	L2 Lagrange Point	Infrared observatory	Daily	Normal		European Space Agency
	Kepler	2009-03-07	Solar orbit	Search for habitable planets	Daily	Normal		NASA Ames
	Microwave Anisotropy Probe	2001-06-30	Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2	Mapping the microwave background	Daily	Normal		NASA Goddard
	Planck	2009-05-14	L2 Lagrange Point	Cosmic microwave background observations	Daily	Normal		European Space Agency
	SOHO	1995-12-02	Sun-Earth Lagrange point L1	Continuous solar observation	Daily	High-gain antenna pointing anomaly		NASA	An amazing recovery occurred in 1998
	WIND	1994-11-01	Sun-Earth Lagrange point L1	Solar wind observations	Daily	Normal	Near Real-Time Data	NASA Goddard
	WISE	2009-12-14	Earth polar orbit	Infrared survey astronomy	Daily	Normal		NASA JPL

Earth-orbiting Observatories The Hubble Space Telescope is certainly the best-known Earth-orbiting observatory, but it is definitely not the only one.
	Probe Name	Date of launch	Current Location	Mission description	Last reported contact	Current status	Live telemetry	Project home page	Comments
	Astro-F	2006-02-22	Polar Earth orbit (745 km)	Infrared astronomy	Daily	Normal		Japanese Space Agency
	Chandra X-Ray Observatory	1999-07-23	Elliptical Earth orbit	X-ray astronomy	Daily	Normal		Harvard University
	COROT	2006-12-27	Earth polar orbit	Extrasolar planetary observation	Daily	Normal		Centre National D'études Spatiales
	Galaxy Evolution Explorer	2003-04-28	702km×690km Earth orbit (preliminary)	Ultraviolet astronomy	Daily	Normal		California Institute of Technology
	HETE-2	2000-10-09	625 km Earth orbit	Gamma-Ray Burst observations	Daily	Normal		Massachussets Institute of Technology
	Hubble Space Telescope	1990-04-25	Low Earth Orbit	Optical astronomy	Daily	Normal		Space Telescope Science Institute
	Integral	2002-10-17	Elliptical Earth orbit	Gamma-ray astronomy	Daily	Normal		European Space Agency
	MOST	2003-06-30	800km Earth orbit	High-precision astornomy	Daily	Normal		Canadian Space Agency	MOST is a 60kg microsatellite launched by a Soviet ICBM booster
	PAMELA	2006-06-15	Elliptical Earth orbit	Antimatter astronomy	Daily	Normal		Italy - Russia	A Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics
	SIRTF	2003-08-25	Solar orbit	Infrared astronomy	Daily	Normal		California Institute of Technology
	Stereo	2006-10-25	Eccentric Earth (transfer) orbit	Solar observations	Daily	Normal		NASA GSFC	Simultaneous observations of the Sun from two spacecraft
	SWAS	1998-12-09	Low Earth orbit	Submillimeter-wave astronomy	Daily	Normal		Harvard University
	Swift	2004-11-20	Low Earth orbit	Gamma-Ray Burst observations	Daily	Normal		NASA Goddard
	TRACE	1998-04-02	Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit	Solar coronal observations	Daily	Normal		Lockheed-Martin
	XMM-Newton	1999-12-10	Elliptical Earth orbit	X-ray astronomy	n/a	Normal		European Space Agency

Creation of this page was inspired by a discussion with Larry Kellogg, so perhaps he'll forgive me if I thank you the way he thanks readers of his space-related newsletter: Thanks for looking up.

accesses to this Web page since December 28, 2001.