— 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.
— Guide for kids, parents & teachers —
Space missions for kids: how we explore space
Almost everything we know about other worlds came from spacecraft. Some fly past a planet, some go into orbit around it, some land, and a few carry people. The missions above include every kind.
What kinds of space missions are there?
- Flybys zoom past a world, taking pictures and measurements on the way. Voyager 1 and 2 and New Horizons are flybys.
- Orbiters go around a planet for months or years to study it closely. Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years.
- Landers and rovers touch down on the surface. Rovers like Perseverance can drive around to study rocks.
- Space telescopes such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope look out into the universe from above Earth’s blurry, glowing air.
- Solar probes such as Parker Solar Probe fly closer to the Sun than anything before them.
- Crewed missions carry astronauts. Apollo 11 landed the first people on the Moon in 1969.
Why do we send robots instead of people?
Robots don’t need air, food or water. They can survive radiation, scorching heat and freezing cold, and they can travel for decades: Voyager 1 has been flying since 1977. Sending people is much harder and more expensive, but people can make quick decisions and fix problems on the spot, which is why astronauts explored the Moon in person.
How do spacecraft talk to Earth?
They send radio signals to giant dish antennas in California, Spain and Australia. The dishes are spread around the world so that, as Earth turns, one of them can always point at the spacecraft. Radio signals travel at the speed of light, but Voyager 1 is so far away that its messages still take nearly a day to arrive.
For teachers
- Ages
- 7–14 (grades 2–8)
- Time
- 20–40 minutes
- Standards
- NGSS MS-ESS1-3, 3-5-ETS1-1
Learning goals
- Sort missions by type: flyby, orbiter, lander or rover, telescope, crewed.
- Explain why a mission is designed around where it is going.
- Connect a mission’s discoveries to the world it explored.
Try this in class
- Give each group one mission card. They answer: where did it go, what kind of mission is it, and what did it discover?
- Build a class timeline from Apollo 11 (1969) to the James Webb Space Telescope (2021).
- Design challenge: plan a mission to a world of your choice. What type of mission is it? What instruments does it carry? How will it cope with distance, heat or cold, and power?
- Use the links on each card to visit that world in the Grand Tour.
Discussion questions
- Why did Perseverance need to land on Mars, when Cassini could study Saturn from orbit?
- Why is it useful to put a telescope in space?
- Which mission would you most like to join, and what would you pack?
Sources
NASA Missions
NASA Voyager status
NASA Cassini
Reviewed Sep 27, 2026