Interplanetary Spaceflight - Current Achievements in Interplanetary Travel

Current Achievements in Interplanetary Travel

Remotely guided space probes have flown by all of the planets of the Solar System from Mercury to Neptune, with the New Horizons probe currently en route to fly by the dwarf planet Pluto and the Dawn spacecraft en route to the dwarf planet Ceres. The four most distant spacecraft (Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2) are on course to leave the Solar System.

In general, planetary orbiters and landers return much more detailed and comprehensive information than fly-by missions. Space probes have been placed into orbit around all the five planets known to the ancients: first Mars (Mariner 9, 1971), then Venus (Venera 9, 1975; but landings on Venus and atmospheric probes were performed even earlier), Jupiter (Galileo, 1995), Saturn (Cassini/Huygens, 2004), and most recently Mercury (MESSENGER, March 2011), and have returned data about these bodies and their natural satellites.

The NEAR Shoemaker mission in 2000 orbited the large near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros, and was even successfully landed there, though it had not been designed with this maneuver in mind. The Japanese ion-drive spacecraft Hayabusa in 2005 also orbited the small near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa, landing on it briefly and returning grains of its surface material to Earth. Another powerful ion-drive mission, Dawn, is in orbit of the large asteroid Vesta in July 2011 and will later move on to the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015.

Remotely-controlled landers such as Viking, Pathfinder and the two Mars Exploration Rovers have landed on the surface of Mars and several Venera and Vega spacecraft have landed on the surface of Venus. The Huygens probe successfully landed on Saturn's moon, Titan.

No manned missions have been sent to any planet of the Solar System. NASA's Apollo program, however, landed twelve people on the Moon and returned them to Earth. The American Vision for Space Exploration, originally introduced by President George W. Bush and put into practice through the Constellation program, had as a long term goal to eventually send human astronauts to Mars. However on February 1, 2010, President Barack Obama proposed cancelling the program in Fiscal Year 2011. An earlier project which received some significant planning by NASA included a manned fly-by of Venus in the Manned Venus Flyby mission, but was cancelled when the Apollo Applications Program was terminated due to NASA budget cuts in the late 1960s.