Mission Targets

The second-most-massive asteroid and the brightest as seen from Earth, a differentiated basaltic body and the parent of the Vesta family, orbited by NASA's Dawn.

A large metal-rich main-belt asteroid, the destination of NASA's Psyche mission to study a possible exposed planetary core.

A Koronis-family main-belt asteroid imaged by the Galileo spacecraft in 1993, which revealed its tiny moon Dactyl — the first confirmed asteroid moon.

The first near-Earth asteroid discovered and the first to be orbited and landed on — by NASA's NEAR Shoemaker in 2000–2001.

A binary Jupiter Trojan trailing Jupiter at the L5 'Trojan camp', and the final flyby target of NASA's Lucy mission.

A small stony near-Earth 'rubble-pile' asteroid, the first body from which samples were returned to Earth, by Japan's Hayabusa in 2010.

A near-Earth binary asteroid whose small moon, Dimorphos, was struck by NASA's DART in 2022 — humanity's first test of asteroid deflection.

A small, carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid sampled by OSIRIS-REx, whose material was returned to Earth in 2023.

A carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid visited by Japan's Hayabusa2, which returned surface and subsurface samples to Earth in 2020.

The largest object in the asteroid belt and the closest dwarf planet to the Sun — the first minor planet discovered, and the only one visited by the Dawn orbiter in the inner Solar System.

The small moon of the near-Earth asteroid Didymos and the impact target of NASA's DART mission — the first object whose orbit humans deliberately changed. ESA's Hera will survey the aftermath.

The largest and best-known Kuiper Belt object, a dwarf planet locked in a 2:3 mean-motion resonance with Neptune (the archetypal 'plutino'), explored by New Horizons in 2015.