Into the Great Unknown

Has life ever existed on Mars? Humankind has sent more than a dozen spacecraft to investigate, with some built to dig into the surface and others to roam its dusty terrain. The ExoMars 2020 mission will be the first to do both.

As NASA scientists finalized their plans for the New Horizons mission in the mid 2000s, the US had already sent space probes to all of our neighboring planets between Mercury and Neptune. But dangling at very edge of the solar system was a dark and icy carrot named Pluto, the final item on a bucket list of planetary exploration.

In this series New Atlas profiles space probes, both past and present, tasked with pushing the boundaries of science by leading us into the great unknown. This week: a spacecraft built to unravel the mysteries hiding behind Jupiter's colorful clouds.

While comet flybys had been performed before, at the outset of the ESA’s Rosetta mission to the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko nobody had ever entered orbit around a comet, let alone try to land on one.

If you are a space agency hoping to visit the planets of our solar system, there may be no better time to do it than when the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto bring them into a tight and neat formation. This rare planetary alignment occurs only once every 175 years, and as NASA embarked on a new chapter of space exploration under President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, it was presented with a unique opportunity. The result was the Voyager mission, humankind’s most epic astronomical adventure to date.

In this week's edition of "Into the great unknown," the spacecraft built to study Saturn and its surroundings in one of our most ambitious space missions to date.

This week we continue to chart the fascinating history of deep space exploration with a look at the Soviet space probes built to study Venus.

In a new series we'll be profiling space probes tasked with pushing the boundaries of science. This week: a spacecraft built to "touch the Sun".