Active Missions
Small-body missions currently in flight — Hera, Lucy, and Psyche.
- LucyActiveNASA / SwRI
A NASA Discovery mission on a twelve-year tour of the Jupiter Trojans — ancient asteroids trapped at Jupiter's Lagrange points that are fossils of planet formation. It is the first mission to these bodies, with main-belt asteroid flybys along the way.
- Type
- Flyby (multiple targets)
- Launched
- 2021-10-16
- PsycheActiveNASA / JPL / ASU
A NASA Discovery mission to the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche — possibly the exposed core of a shattered protoplanet. Using solar-electric propulsion, it will orbit and map a world made largely of metal, a type never before visited.
- Type
- Rendezvous · orbiter
- Launched
- 2023-10-13
- HeraActiveESA
ESA's follow-up to DART and the European half of the AIDA collaboration — it is cruising to the Didymos–Dimorphos system to survey the crater DART left and measure Dimorphos's mass, turning the DART experiment into a well-characterised deflection.
- Type
- Rendezvous · orbiter (planetary defense)
- Launched
- 2024-10-07