Mission class · 10 missions

Flyby Mission

A spacecraft that passes a small body once at high speed, gathering images and data during a brief encounter. Flybys are the cheapest way to reach a new target — Giotto at Halley, Deep Space 1 at Borrelly, Lucy at the Trojans.

Definition

A single high-speed pass of a target body, without entering orbit.

Missions of this class

GiottoCompleted
ESA
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
NEAR ShoemakerCompleted
NASA / JHU APL
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
Deep Space 1Completed
NASA / JPL
A NASA New Millennium technology-demonstration mission that validated ion propulsion and autonomous navigation, then used them to fly past asteroid 9969 Braille and, most notably, comet 19P/Borrelly — returning some of the best comet-nucleus images of its time.
Type
Flyby (technology demonstration)
Launched
1998-10-24
StardustCompleted
NASA / JPL
NASA's comet sample-return mission — it flew through the coma of comet Wild 2, captured dust in aerogel, and parachuted the sample capsule to Earth in 2006: the first sample return from a comet, and the first return of solid material from beyond the Moon (NASA's Genesis had returned solar-wind atoms in 2004). Its extended mission (Stardust-NExT) later imaged the Deep Impact crater on Tempel 1.
Type
Flyby · sample return
Launched
1999-02-07
Deep ImpactCompleted
NASA / JPL / University of Maryland
A NASA Discovery mission that released a 370 kg impactor into the path of comet 9P/Tempel 1 in 2005, excavating material from below the surface while the flyby spacecraft observed the impact — the first look inside a comet.
Type
Flyby · impactor
Launched
2005-01-12
LucyActive
NASA / 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
EPOXIExtended mission
NASA / JPL
The extended mission of the Deep Impact spacecraft — it flew within about 700 km of the small, hyperactive comet 103P/Hartley 2 in 2010, revealing a peanut-shaped nucleus jetting carbon-dioxide-driven plumes.
Type
Flyby (extended mission)
Comet InterceptorPlanned
ESA / JAXA
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)
DESTINY+Planned
JAXA
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)
Janus (cancelled)Cancelled
NASA / Lockheed Martin
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)

Sources

The primary and reference sources this topic draws on.

NASANational Aeronautics and Space Administration
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.
ESAEuropean Space Agency
European missions, observatories, and space science imagery.