Imaging & Sensors

The first spacecraft to fly by Mars and return close-up photographs of another planet.

The first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt and fly past Jupiter.

America’s first space station hosts three crews and proves humans can live in space for months.

The first fully successful Mars landing returns years of images and searches for life.

The only spacecraft to visit all four giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

The most distant human-made object, first to enter interstellar space.

Radar mapping strips away the clouds of Venus to reveal a world of volcanoes and lava plains.

The first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter discovers evidence of an ocean inside Europa.

The telescope that rewrote astronomy, saved in orbit by five servicing missions.

Airbags bounce a lander onto Mars carrying Sojourner, the first rover on another planet.

Thirteen years at Saturn, and the first landing on a moon of another planet.

A 90-day rover mission that lasted six years and found evidence of ancient hot springs on Mars.

The record-breaking rover drives a marathon across Mars over nearly 15 years.

The infrared Great Observatory peers through cosmic dust and studies distant exoplanets.

The fastest launch in history delivers the first close-up look at Pluto.

A polar lander digs into the Martian arctic and touches water ice for the first time.

The planet hunter that proved planets outnumber stars in our galaxy.

A solar-powered spacecraft dives through Jupiter’s radiation belts to probe its hidden interior.

A car-sized nuclear-powered rover lands via sky crane and proves ancient Mars was habitable.

An orbiter solves the mystery of how Mars lost its atmosphere to the solar wind.

A seven-year round trip brings back pristine samples of asteroid Bennu.

A seismometer on the Martian plains listens to marsquakes and maps the planet’s interior.

The fastest human-made object flies through the Sun’s atmosphere.

A sample-caching rover and the first aircraft to fly on another planet.

Humanity’s first planetary defense test successfully changes an asteroid’s orbit.

The most powerful space telescope ever built unfolds a million miles from Earth.

The largest planetary spacecraft NASA has ever built heads for Jupiter’s ocean moon.