Mission Archive · 1957 — Beyond

A Visual Chronicle of Humanity's Voyages Beyond Earth

From Sputnik's first beep to the next generation of interplanetary probes, follow the spacecraft, telescopes, and crews that have quietly redrawn our place in the cosmos — mission by mission, observation by observation.

Begin the Timeline Browse Mission Profiles

The Timeline

Six Missions That Shaped the Modern Space Age

Each milestone is a small hinge on which the entire trajectory of exploration turned. We have profiled six — three that already changed everything, two operating right now, and one preparing to leave the launchpad.

Past · 1977 — Present

Voyager 1 & 2 — The Interstellar Messengers

NASA / JPL Status: Active Interstellar Space

Launched weeks apart in the summer of 1977, the twin Voyagers exploited a rare planetary alignment to visit all four gas giants. Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012, becoming the first human-made object in interstellar space. Both still return data from beyond the Sun's protective bubble, each carrying a golden record pressed with sounds of Earth.

Distance

15.4 B mi

Instruments

10 active

Power

RTG · 225 W

Past · 1990 — Present

Hubble Space Telescope — A Quarter-Century of Clarity

NASA / ESA Status: Operating Low Earth Orbit

After a famously blurry beginning corrected by a space-shuttle eyeglass, Hubble has logged more than 1.5 million observations. It refined the expansion rate of the universe, captured the iconic Pillars of Creation in unprecedented detail, and gave astronomers a reliable eye above the atmosphere for nearly thirty-five years and counting.

Observations

1.5 M+

Mirror

2.4 m

Altitude

540 km

Past · 2018 — Present

Kepler & TESS — The Planet Hunters

NASA Ames Kepler Retired Sun–Earth L2

Kepler's four-year stare at a single patch of the Milky Way proved that planets are the rule, not the exception — confirming more than 2,700 worlds before running out of fuel in 2018. Its successor, TESS, now surveys nearly the entire sky, flagging the nearest, brightest exoplanet candidates for the next generation of ground- and space-based follow-up.

Confirmed

5,500+

Stars Surveyed

530,000+

Candidates

9,800+

Present · 2021 — Active

James Webb Space Telescope — The Infrared Time Machine

NASA / ESA / CSA Operational Sun–Earth L2

Webb's segmented golden eye looks deeper into the infrared universe than anything before it — capturing galaxies as they existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, dissecting the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, and revealing star formation inside cosmic dust clouds once thought impenetrable. It is, in every sense, a time machine parked 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

Mirror

6.5 m

Temp

−233 °C

Partners

14 Nations

Present · 2024 — Active

Europa Clipper — Bound for an Ocean World

NASA JPL In Transit Jupiter System

Jupiter's icy moon Europa harbors more liquid water than all of Earth's oceans combined. Clipper's job is not to find life outright, but to determine whether the conditions are right — tasting plumes, mapping the ice shell with radar, and characterizing the chemistry of the subsurface sea during forty-nine close flybys beginning in 2030.

Arrival

2030

Instruments

9 suites

Solar Arrays

90 ft span

Future · 2027 (Planned)

Habitable Worlds Observatory — The Successor to Hubble & Webb

NASA (Pre-Formulation) Status: In Design Sun–Earth L2

The next Great Observatory is being designed to do something none of its predecessors could: directly image Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars and read their spectra for signs of water, oxygen, and methane. UV, visible, and infrared in a single aperture, with a coronagraph built in from day one. If the architecture survives its reviews, launch slips to the early 2040s — and with it, our first real chance to find a true twin of our own world.

Mirror

~6 m

Bands

UV / Vis / IR

Target

25 HabZones

Mission Profiles

More Voyages From the Archive

Six additional missions — from a low-cost CubeSat constellation mapping lunar water to a long-duration orbital telescope tracking the most energetic explosions in the universe.

Observatory · 2027+

PLATO — Hunting for Earth Twins

ESA's PLATO will monitor hundreds of thousands of bright stars for tiny, regular dips in brightness — the calling card of a transiting planet — to find rocky worlds in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars.

Read the dossier

Planetary · 2029 (Planned)

Dragonfly to Titan

A nuclear-powered octocopter that will fly between organic-rich sites on Saturn's largest moon, sampling prebiotic chemistry on the surface of a world with lakes, dunes, and a thick nitrogen atmosphere.

Read the dossier

Planetary · 2024 — Active

Mars Sample Return Network

A multinational relay of landers, orbiters, and a long-awaited rocket designed to bring tubes of Martian regolith home — the most ambitious multi-agency planetary campaign ever attempted.

Read the dossier

Observatory · Active

IXPE — X-ray Polarimetry

NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer measures the orientation of X-ray light from neutron stars, black holes, and supernova remnants — a parameter that reveals geometry no other telescope can read.

Read the dossier

CubeSats · 2022 — Active

Lunar Flashlight & CAPSTONE

Briefcase-sized scouts probing the Moon's south-pole craters for surface ice and validating the halo orbit planned for Gateway — proving that small satellites can carry flagship-class questions.

Read the dossier

Human Spaceflight · 2024 — Active

Artemis II — The Crewed Lunar Return

Four astronauts on a figure-eight around the Moon and back — the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit in over half a century, and the proving flight for everything Artemis III will attempt to land.

Read the dossier

How We Profile

How a Mission Enters the Archive

Every entry on A Cosmic Trail is built from primary sources — instrument papers, mission status reports, peer-reviewed results — and rewritten for readers who want the signal without the static.

Source the Mission

We track active campaigns, archived datasets, and the proceedings of the American Astronomical Society to identify missions with new science, new imagery, or significant status changes worth a deep profile.

Trace the Trajectory

Each profile is plotted against a timeline — launch, cruise, encounter, extended mission — so you can see at a glance where the spacecraft is, where it has been, and what the next milestone is.

Translate the Science

Every abstract becomes a clear, paragraph-level explanation. Every number is paired with a unit. Every acronym is expanded on first use. You leave the page knowing something you did not know when you arrived.

Track the next observation as it happens.

Mission profiles are updated with new imagery, status reports, and science releases as they emerge. Subscribe to the weekly dispatch, or browse the observation logs from the field.

Read the Weekly Dispatch Open Observing Logs