Asteroid Missions

NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission — the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid (433 Eros) and, in an unplanned finale, the first to soft-land on one. It mapped Eros for a year before its controlled descent in 2001.

Type

Flyby · rendezvous · orbiter · landing

Launched

1996-02-17

A NASA Discovery mission and the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies — it used ion propulsion to orbit the giant asteroid 4 Vesta and then the dwarf planet 1 Ceres, the two most massive bodies in the main asteroid belt.

Type

Rendezvous · orbiter (two bodies)

Launched

2007-09-27

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

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

A JAXA technology-demonstration and flyby mission that will test advanced ion propulsion en route to a flyby of 3200 Phaethon — the rock-comet source of the Geminid meteor shower — studying its dust.

Type

Flyby (technology demonstration)

A NASA SIMPLEx pair of small spacecraft designed to fly by binary asteroids. Built to share Psyche's launch, the twins were left without a viable trajectory when Psyche slipped by a year, and the mission was cancelled with the spacecraft put into storage.

Type

Flyby (twin smallsats)