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Montage of planets and some moons that the two Voyager spacecraft have visited and studied. It is the only program that visited all four outer planets. A total of nine spacecraft have been launched on missions that involve visits to the outer planets; all nine missions involve encounters with Jupiter, with four spacecraft also visiting Saturn.
During the mission, an uncrewed Orion capsule spent 10 days in a distant retrograde 60,000 kilometers (37,000 mi) orbit around the Moon before returning to Earth. [10] Artemis II , the first crewed mission of the program, will launch four astronauts in 2025 [ 11 ] on a free-return flyby of the Moon at a distance of 8,900 kilometers (5,500 mi).
Missions to Saturn face competition from missions to other Solar System bodies. The Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) was a joint NASA/ESA proposal for an exploration of Saturn and its moons [10] Titan and Enceladus, where many complex phenomena have been revealed by the recent Cassini–Huygens mission.
Saturn and Titan 15 October 1997 1 July 2004 entered orbit: 2452 days (6 yr, 8 mo, 17 d) Mission ended 15 September 2017. Saturn orbiter, performing repeated by-flights of Saturn's moons; also deployed the Huygens Titan lander, the first probe to land on a satellite of another planet. [51] [52] 14 January 2005 Huygens landed on Titan
NASA's Cassini spacecraft sent back images looking over the shoulder of Saturn's rings. See more on Saturn's rings: No telescope on this planet would ever have been able to see this.
The Voyager program's discoveries during the primary phase of its mission, including new close-up color photos of the major planets, were regularly documented by print and electronic media outlets. Among the best-known of these is an image of the Earth as a Pale Blue Dot, taken in 1990 by Voyager 1, and popularized by Carl Sagan, [63]
Mission name Launch date Description Ref(s) Sputnik 1: 4 October 1957 First Earth orbiter [1] [2] Sputnik 2: 3 November 1957 Earth orbiter, first animal in orbit, a dog named Laika [2] [3] [4] Explorer 1: 1 February 1958 Earth orbiter; discovered Van Allen radiation belts [5] Vanguard 1: 17 March 1958 Earth orbiter; oldest spacecraft still in ...
Cassini–Huygens (/ k ə ˈ s iː n i ˈ h ɔɪ ɡ ən z / kə-SEE-nee HOY-gənz), commonly called Cassini, was a space-research mission by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to send a space probe to study the planet Saturn and its system, including its rings and natural satellites.