ESA Missions

ESA's first deep-space mission — it flew within about 600 km of the nucleus of Halley's Comet in 1986, returning the first close-up images of a comet's nucleus. It survived the high-speed dust encounter and went on to fly past a second comet, Grigg–Skjellerup.

Type

Flyby

Launched

1985-07-02

ESA's landmark comet mission — the first to orbit a comet nucleus and, via its Philae lander, the first to soft-land on one. It escorted comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko through perihelion for two years before its own controlled descent to the surface in 2016.

Type

Rendezvous · orbiter · lander

Launched

2004-03-02

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

An ESA (with JAXA) fast-class mission that will wait at the Sun–Earth L2 point for a suitable target, then fly by a pristine, dynamically-new comet — ideally one entering the inner Solar System for the first time, or even an interstellar object.

Type

Flyby (multi-probe)

An early-2000s ESA planetary-defense concept — a two-spacecraft study in which an impactor (Hidalgo) would strike an asteroid while an orbiter (Sancho) measured the deflection. It was never built, but it prefigured the AIDA/DART–Hera approach.

Type

Impactor + orbiter (concept)

ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission — the original European orbiter half of the AIDA collaboration, meant to observe the DART impact in real time. It was not funded in 2016, but its science was largely revived and reshaped as the Hera mission.

Type

Rendezvous · orbiter (concept)