Everything on the map

G-type Main-sequence Star. The star at the heart of it all. A vast sphere of plasma whose gravity holds every world in orbit and whose light makes the whole system visible. It is over 100 times the radius of Earth.

Terrestrial Planet. The smallest planet and the closest to the Sun. A cratered, airless world of extreme temperature swings, racing around its orbit in just 88 days.

Terrestrial Planet. Earth’s scorching twin, wrapped in thick clouds of sulfuric acid and a runaway greenhouse atmosphere that makes it the hottest planet in the system.

Terrestrial Planet. The cradle of every mission ever flown. A pale blue world wrapped in a thin, glowing atmosphere, and the launch point for all of humanity’s reach into space.

Terrestrial Planet. The rust-red desert world and the prime target for future human exploration. Home to the tallest volcano and the deepest canyon in the solar system.

Gas Giant. The giant of the solar system, a swirling ball of hydrogen and helium banded with storms, including the centuries-old Great Red Spot. It hosts dozens of moons.

Gas Giant. The jewel of the system, encircled by a breathtaking system of icy rings spanning thousands of kilometers yet only meters thick in places.

Ice Giant. A pale cyan ice giant that orbits tipped almost entirely on its side, giving it the most extreme seasons of any planet in the solar system.

Ice Giant. The deep blue, windswept outermost giant, with the fastest winds in the solar system and a faint set of rings hidden in its darkness.

Dwarf Planet. The famous dwarf planet of the Kuiper Belt, on a tilted, eccentric orbit far from the Sun. A frozen world of nitrogen ice, mountains, and a heart-shaped plain.

Natural Satellite. Earth’s only natural satellite, orbiting at an average distance of 384,400 km. The next frontier for sustained human presence and the target of the Artemis program.

Natural Satellite. The larger, inner moon of Mars. A small, irregular, heavily cratered body spiraling slowly inward toward the planet.

Natural Satellite. The smaller, outer moon of Mars. A smooth-looking dusty body, likely a captured asteroid.

Galilean Moon. The most volcanically active body in the solar system, its surface constantly reshaped by hundreds of erupting volcanoes.

Galilean Moon. An icy world hiding a vast saltwater ocean beneath its frozen crust, one of the most promising places to search for life.

Galilean Moon. The largest moon in the solar system, bigger than the planet Mercury, and the only moon known to have its own magnetic field.

Galilean Moon. The outermost Galilean moon, one of the most heavily cratered objects in the solar system and a possible future crewed base.

Natural Satellite. A small icy moon dominated by the enormous Herschel crater, giving it a famous resemblance to a certain space station.

Natural Satellite. A brilliant white ice moon that erupts plumes of water vapor from its south pole, feeding one of Saturn’s rings.

Natural Satellite. A bright, icy moon scarred by the giant Odysseus crater and a vast canyon system stretching most of the way around it.

Natural Satellite. An icy moon laced with bright wispy cliffs of fractured ice, and a faint hint of a tenuous oxygen exosphere.

Natural Satellite. Saturn’s second-largest moon, a heavily cratered ball of ice and rock that may once have had a faint ring of its own.

Natural Satellite. Saturn’s giant moon, larger than Mercury, shrouded in a thick orange atmosphere with lakes and rivers of liquid methane.

Natural Satellite. The two-faced moon, one hemisphere dark as coal and the other bright as snow, encircled by a strange equatorial ridge.

Natural Satellite. A small moon with a bizarre, jumbled surface of giant cliffs and mismatched terrain, as if shattered and reassembled.

Natural Satellite. The brightest of Uranus’s moons, with a relatively young surface cut by extensive valleys and fault scarps.

Natural Satellite. The darkest of Uranus’s large moons, an ancient cratered world marked by a mysterious bright ring nicknamed the fluorescent cheerio.

Natural Satellite. Uranus’s largest moon, scarred by enormous canyons and fault valleys hundreds of kilometers long.

Natural Satellite. The outermost large moon of Uranus, an old, dark, cratered world with mountains rising high above its limb.

Natural Satellite. Neptune’s largest moon and the only big moon orbiting backwards, a captured world with nitrogen geysers and a young, icy surface.

Natural Satellite. One of the darkest objects in the solar system, an irregular, heavily cratered moon right at the limit of how large a body can be while staying non-spherical.

Natural Satellite. Pluto’s enormous companion, so large relative to Pluto that the two orbit a point in empty space between them, making a true double system.

Natural Satellite. A small, elongated moon of Pluto that tumbles chaotically as it orbits the Pluto-Charon pair.

Natural Satellite. The outermost known moon of Pluto, a small, bright, irregular body of water ice.

Crewed Space Station. A continuously inhabited research laboratory orbiting about 400 km above Earth, crewed without interruption since November 2000. Operations are planned through 2030.

Crewed Space Station. China’s modular space station, permanently crewed by rotating Shenzhou crews and supporting a growing program of microgravity research and technology demonstrations.

Crewed Orbital Test (Planned). A crewed shakedown in Earth orbit, and the dress rehearsal for a landing. Orion will rendezvous and dock with test versions of the commercial lunar landers, check out life support and propulsion while docked, and put the new spacesuits through their first orbital tests.

Space Observatory. The space telescope that reshaped our understanding of galaxies, nebulae, and the age of the universe, still doing frontier science after more than three decades in orbit.

Space Observatory. The most powerful space telescope ever built, observing the infrared universe from a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, 1.5 million km from Earth.

Space Observatory. NASA’s next great observatory, with a mirror the size of Hubble’s and a field of view a hundred times wider. It will survey billions of galaxies to map dark energy, and watch for the brief flickers that reveal distant planets.

Lunar Orbiter. NASA’s long-running lunar mapper, imaging the surface at high resolution for more than 15 years. Its maps underpin every modern landing-site selection, including Artemis.

Lunar Orbiter. South Korea’s first deep-space mission, a lunar orbiter carrying cameras and a NASA instrument that peers into permanently shadowed polar craters.

Lunar Lander and Rover. The first mission ever to land on the far side of the Moon, in Von Kármán crater. Its Yutu-2 rover became the longest-operating lunar rover in history.

Sample Return Lander. The first mission to return samples from the far side of the Moon. It landed in the Apollo basin in June 2024 and sent 1,935 grams of lunar soil back to Earth.

Lunar South Pole Mission. China’s multi-part south pole mission: an orbiter, lander, rover, and a hopping probe designed to search shadowed craters for water ice.

Historic Landing Site. The Sea of Tranquility, where humans first set foot on another world on July 20, 1969. The descent stage, instruments, and first footprints remain undisturbed.

Crewed Landing (Planned). The mission that will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972, targeting the south polar region with a commercial human landing system.

Lunar Lander. Griffin Mission One is a lunar landing flight by Astrobotic. The Griffin lander will deliver Astrolab’s FLIP lunar rover to the Moon following the cancellation of NASA’s VIPER mission.

Lunar Lander. Blue Ghost Lunar Lander Mission 2 is Firefly Aerospace’s second Moon mission. Using a two-stage vehicle, it will deliver ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder satellite to lunar orbit and deploy NASA scientific payloads to the far side of the Moon.

Lunar Lander. Nova-C IM-3 is Intuitive Machines’ third lunar landing mission. The Nova-C lander will deliver 130 kg of scientific and technological payloads to the surface of the Moon.

Historic Landing Site. The first spacecraft to land on another planet and transmit from its surface, in December 1970. It survived Venus’s crushing heat for about 23 minutes.

Historic Landing Site. The lander that returned the first color photographs of the Venusian surface in March 1982, surviving the furnace-like conditions for a record 127 minutes.

Venus Orbiter. Japan’s Venus climate orbiter, which studied the planet’s super-rotating atmosphere for nearly a decade before contact was lost in 2024.

Mars Rover. NASA’s flagship astrobiology rover, exploring Jezero crater, an ancient river delta. It has cached sealed rock samples for a future return to Earth.

Mars Rover. The nuclear-powered rover that proved Gale crater once held a habitable lake. Still climbing Mount Sharp after more than a decade on Mars.

Mars Rover. China’s first Mars rover, which explored Utopia Planitia for about a year before entering hibernation for the Martian winter in 2022. It never woke up.

Mars Lander. The seismology lander that detected more than 1,300 marsquakes and revealed the internal structure of Mars before dust ended its mission in December 2022.

Mars Orbiter. The sharpest eye at Mars for two decades. Its HiRISE camera resolves objects under a meter across and serves as the main relay for the rovers.

Mars Orbiter. The longest-serving spacecraft at another planet, mapping Martian minerals and ice since 2001 and still relaying rover data a quarter century later.

Mars Orbiter. Studied how the solar wind stripped away the Martian atmosphere, turning a once-wet world into a desert. Doubled as a communications relay.

Mars Orbiter. Europe’s first planetary mission, still imaging Mars in 3D and sounding for subsurface water after more than two decades in orbit.

Mars Orbiter. Hunts for trace gases like methane that could hint at geological or biological activity, and maps shallow subsurface water ice.

Mars Orbiter. China’s first independent Mars mission, which delivered the Zhurong rover and continues to map the planet from orbit.

Mars Orbiter. The Arab world’s first interplanetary mission, watching Martian weather from a uniquely high orbit that sees whole hemispheres at once.

Mars Exploration. Martian Moon eXplorer is a JAXA mission to collect and return samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars. It carries scientific instruments and a small French-German rover to explore the surface of Phobos.

Jupiter Orbiter. The solar-powered orbiter that unveiled Jupiter’s polar cyclones, deep interior, and faint rings from a looping polar orbit, with bonus flybys of Ganymede, Europa, and Io.

Titan Rotorcraft (Planned). A car-sized nuclear-powered octocopter that will fly from dune to dune across Titan, sampling organic chemistry on a world with methane rain and rivers.

Jupiter-bound Spacecraft. The largest planetary spacecraft NASA has ever built, on its way to survey Europa’s hidden ocean with dozens of close flybys. It swung past Mars in March 2025.

Jupiter-bound Spacecraft. Europe’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, headed for Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. It flew past Venus in August 2025 to shape its long route outward.

Mercury-bound Spacecraft. A twin-orbiter mission to Mercury, flying the long way in with nine planetary flybys. Thruster issues delayed its arrival, now set for late 2026.

Asteroid-bound Spacecraft. Cruising on ion engines toward 16 Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid that may be the exposed core of a shattered protoplanet. It flew past Mars in May 2026.

Asteroid-bound Spacecraft. A twelve-year odyssey to the Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit. It has already flown past main-belt asteroids Dinkinesh and Donaldjohanson.

Solar Probe. The fastest spacecraft ever flown, diving through the Sun’s corona every few months. At closest approach it passes within 6.2 million km of the solar surface.

Interstellar Probe. The farthest human-made object, coasting through interstellar space more than 170 times the Earth-Sun distance away. Its golden record carries the sounds of Earth.

Interstellar Probe. The only spacecraft ever to visit Uranus and Neptune, now in interstellar space below the plane of the planets, running on its last watts of plutonium power.

Kuiper Belt Probe. The probe that revealed Pluto’s heart in 2015 and flew past Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in 2019, now studying the outer heliosphere on its way toward interstellar space.