Twelve extraordinary voyages — from the Moon to interstellar space, from Mars dust to the light of the universe's first stars. Each one pushed the boundary of what we thought possible.
The mission that changed everything. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on another world, fulfilling President Kennedy's challenge and proving that anything is possible. Armstrong's "one small step" was watched by 600 million people — a fifth of humanity at the time.
Launched 16 days apart, the twin Voyager probes have flown past all four outer planets and are now in interstellar space. Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever built. Each carries a Golden Record — a time capsule of sounds, images, and greetings from Earth, intended for any intelligent life that might find it.
For over three decades, Hubble has been humanity's eye on the deep universe. Despite a initially flawed mirror (corrected in 1993), it transformed astronomy — providing evidence for dark energy, revealing the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years, and capturing images of galaxies billions of light-years away. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field showed 10,000 galaxies in a patch of sky smaller than a grain of sand held at arm's length.
For 13 years Cassini orbited Saturn, revealing a world of breathtaking complexity. It discovered active geysers on Enceladus shooting water ice into space — suggesting a liquid water ocean beneath the surface. The Huygens probe parachuted through the atmosphere of Titan and landed on another world's surface, the farthest landing from Earth in history. The mission ended in a deliberate "Grand Finale" dive into Saturn's atmosphere in 2017.
Not a mission but humanity's deepest photograph of the cosmos. Hubble stared at a seemingly empty patch of sky — about 1/13th the size of the full Moon — for nearly 12 days, collecting light from 10,000 galaxies. Some are billions of light-years away. The image fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe's scale and structure. The eXtreme Deep Field (2012) went deeper still.
Curiosity is a car-sized rover that has been exploring Gale Crater since August 2012. It confirmed that Mars was once a habitable environment with liquid water, sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon — the chemical building blocks for life. It continues operating today, having driven over 32 km on the Martian surface and climbed 700 metres up Mount Sharp.
After a 9.5 year, 5-billion-km journey, New Horizons flew past Pluto in July 2015 and revealed a world of extraordinary complexity — mountain ranges of water ice, a nitrogen glacier heart-shaped plain called Tombaugh Regio, and a hazy atmosphere. Pluto went from an unknown dot in ground-based telescopes to a geologically active world in a single afternoon.
The most powerful telescope humanity has ever built. Seeing in infrared, JWST can peer through dust clouds that blocked Hubble, reaching the universe's first stars and galaxies formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Its first images — released July 2022 — showed the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe ever captured, detected exoplanet atmospheres, and revealed thousands of previously hidden stars in the Carina Nebula.
Perseverance is collecting rock core samples from Jezero Crater — an ancient lake bed — for eventual return to Earth, our best chance yet at finding evidence of ancient Martian life. It also brought Ingenuity, a small helicopter that achieved the first powered controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity's 72+ flights paved the way for future aerial exploration of Mars.
The ISS is humanity's continuous presence in space since November 2000 — over 24 years without a break in human habitation of low Earth orbit. A football field-length laboratory orbiting at 28,000 km/h, it has hosted 273 astronauts from 20 countries and conducted over 3,000 scientific experiments. From it, Earth looks like a pale marble and the ISS's orbital photography has given us the "Overview Effect".
India's Mars Orbiter Mission — called Mangalyaan, meaning "Mars craft" in Sanskrit — made history on 24 September 2014 when it entered Mars orbit on the very first attempt. India became the first nation on Earth to succeed at Mars on its maiden try, and the first Asian country to reach the Red Planet. Built in just 15 months for $74 million — less than the production budget of the Hollywood film "Gravity" — it proved that cost-efficient, elegant engineering could achieve what only the United States, Soviet Union, and European Space Agency had managed before. The mission was a defining moment for the Indian space programme and for the developing world's aspirations in space.
On 23 August 2023, India's Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft in history to successfully land near the lunar south pole — a region of profound scientific importance believed to harbour water ice in permanently shadowed craters. Just days before, Russia's Luna-25 had crashed attempting the same feat. ISRO's Vikram lander touched down softly and deployed the Pragyan rover, which explored the surface for 14 days. India became the fourth nation to achieve a soft Moon landing and the first to reach the south pole. The mission was watched live by hundreds of millions worldwide, and ISRO named the landing site "Shiv Shakti Point."
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