— We didn't just look —
We sent explorers
People have built robots, telescopes, and spaceships and sent them out to visit the worlds you've been exploring. Here are some of the most amazing real missions — every one of them actually happened.
Reference recordAccuracy & sources
Mission histories come from NASA mission records and were reviewed in August 2026. Changing values are identified as estimates; follow each card’s NASA source for current status and imagery.
Source indexNASA MissionsReviewed Aug 16, 2026
🛰️Launched 1977
Voyager 1 & 2
The farthest travellers
Two probes that flew past the giant planets and kept going. Both have crossed the heliopause — the edge of the Sun's protective bubble — into interstellar space. Each carries a Golden Record of sounds and pictures from Earth.
✦ WowVoyager 1 is so far away that its faint radio whisper takes nearly 24 hours to reach Earth.
⟡ Live estimateVoyager 1 is about 25,320,225,956 km from the Sun. This linear estimate starts from a January 2026 reference and adds about 16.9 km each second.
NASA mission source ↗
Visit Neptune, its last flyby →
🤖Launched 2020
Perseverance
A robot geologist on Mars
A car-sized rover exploring Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake and river delta. It searches for signs of ancient microbial life and caches rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth.
🔭Launched 2021
James Webb Space Telescope
A time machine for light
A giant telescope with a golden mirror, orbiting the Sun near the Sun–Earth L2 point about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. It sees infrared light, letting it peer through dust and spot galaxies from when the universe was very young.
🪐Launched 1997
Cassini
Saturn's explorer
A spacecraft that orbited Saturn for 13 years, studying its rings and moons. It carried ESA's Huygens probe, which parachuted through Titan's hazy atmosphere and landed on its surface.
🚀Launched 2006
New Horizons
The Pluto flyby
A fast little probe about the size of a piano. After nine years of travel it zoomed past Pluto in 2015 and gave us our very first close-up photographs of that faraway world.
☀️Launched 2018
Parker Solar Probe
The Sun-toucher
A spacecraft that flies closer to the Sun than anything before it. A carbon-composite heat shield protects its instruments while it studies the corona, the Sun's hot outer atmosphere.
🌕Launched 1969
Apollo 11
First footsteps on the Moon
The mission that carried the first people to walk on the Moon. Two astronauts stepped onto the dusty grey surface while a third orbited above in the spacecraft.
✨Launched 1990
Hubble Telescope
Our eye in the sky
A school-bus-sized telescope that has orbited high above Earth since 1990. It has taken some of the most beautiful and famous pictures of stars and galaxies ever made.