List of uncrewed NASA missions
Explorer 1 was launched January 31, 1958; at this time the project still belonged to the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
[4] The Explorer program was later transferred to NASA, which continued to use the name for an ongoing series of relatively small space missions, typically an artificial satellite with a science focus.
Both carry a golden plaque, depicting a man and a woman and information about the origin and the creators of the probes, should any extraterrestrials find them someday.
The Ranger program was a series of uncrewed space missions by the United States in the 1960s whose objective was to obtain the first close-up images of the surface of the Moon.
Bell Telephone Laboratories also developed much of the technology required for satellite communication, including transistors, solar cells, and traveling wave tube amplifiers.
[11] The Mariner program conducted by NASA launched a series of robotic interplanetary probes designed to investigate Mars, Venus and Mercury.
All Mariner spacecraft were based on a hexagonal or octagonal "bus", which housed all of the electronics, and to which all components were attached, such as antennae, cameras, propulsion, and power sources.
The first three missions were dedicated to imaging 20 potential human lunar landing sites, selected based on Earth-based observations.
[28] As of January 19, 2019[update], Voyager 1 was at a distance of 145.148 AU (13.492 billion miles (21.713×10^9 km)) from Earth, traveling away from the Sun at a speed of about 10.6 mi/s (17.1 km/s), which corresponds to a greater specific orbital energy than any other probe.
[29] The first of NASA's three High Energy Astronomy Observatories, HEAO 1, launched August 12, 1977, aboard an Atlas rocket with a Centaur upper stage, operated until January 9, 1979.
Although not unique in this endeavor, the SMM was notable in that its useful life compared with similar spacecraft was significantly increased by the direct intervention of a human space mission.
Magellan, performed detailed imaging and analysis of craters, hills, ridges, and other geologic formations, to a degree comparable to the visible-light photographic mapping of other planets.
Although not the first space telescope, Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy.
Missions funded by NASA through this program include Mars Pathfinder, Kepler, Stardust, Genesis and Deep Impact.
On board the lander, later renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, was a small rover called Sojourner that executed many experiments on the Martian surface.
The mission was directed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, responsible for NASA's Mars Exploration Program.
Stardust was a 300-kilogram robotic space probe launched by NASA on February 7, 1999, to study the asteroid 5535 Annefrank and collect samples from the coma of comet Wild 2.
[55] Stardust intercepted comet Tempel 1 on February 15, 2011, a small Solar System body previously visited by Deep Impact on July 4, 2005.
Launched on January 25, 1994, the objective of the mission was to test sensors and spacecraft components under extended exposure to the space environment and to make scientific observations of the Moon and the near-Earth asteroid 1620 Geographos.
It launched on October 15, 1997, on a Titan IVB/Centaur and entered into orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004, after an interplanetary voyage which included flybys of Earth, Venus, and Jupiter.
Sixteen European countries and the United States made up the team responsible for designing, building, flying and collecting data from the Cassini orbiter and Huygens probe.
[70] After several mission extensions, Cassini was deliberately plunged into Saturn's atmosphere on September 15, 2017, to prevent contamination of habitable moons.
[80] The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90-Martian-day (sol) primary mission was US$820 million.
[82] The 485-kilogram (1,069 lb) spacecraft was launched aboard a Delta II rocket in August 2004 to study Mercury's chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field.
[96] The CRS program now provides for all America's ISS cargo needs, with the exception of a few vehicle-specific payloads that are delivered on the European ATV and the Japanese HTV.
[104] In November 2018, NASA reported that Dawn had run out of fuel, effectively ending its mission; it will remain in orbit around Ceres, but can no longer communicate with Earth.
To this end, a detailed mapping program identifies safe landing sites, locates potential resources on the Moon, characterizes the radiation environment, and demonstrates new technology.
[109][110] The first images from LRO were published on July 2, 2009, showing a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds).
In April 2022, NASA extended the LRO mission for it to continue to study the Moon's surface and geologic features and also investigate new regions enabled with the evolution of LRO's orbit [115] Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a NASA mission to land and operate a rover named Curiosity on the surface of Mars.
[127][128][129] The Mars 2020 mission was announced by NASA on 4 December 2012 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
