List of artificial objects on extra-terrestrial surfaces
MER-A Spirit rover lander
Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle in its final resting place on the Moon
Scale model of the Huygens probe which landed on Titan
List of artificial objects on Mars
List of artificial objects on the Moon
List of artificial objects on Venus
Artificial objects on other Solar-System bodies
Objects that landed substantially intact
- On the asteroid Eros, the NEAR Shoemaker probe touched down on the surface on 12 February 2001, although it had not been specifically designed for this purpose.
- On Titan, a moon of Saturn, the Huygens probe from the Cassini–Huygens mission landed successfully on 14 January 2005. NASA currently has plans to steer the main spacecraft into Saturn's atmosphere after its mission ends to prevent the contamination of Titan's surface by any terrestrial microbes.
- On the asteroid 25143 Itokawa, a target marker from the Hayabusa probe, which has a list of 880,000 names etched on it, was released to the surface on 19 November 2005.
- On Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the Philae lander from the Rosetta spacecraft successfully landed on 12 November 2014 in an area called Agilkia. It bounced after the initial touchdown and ended up in a spot named Abydos.
Objects destroyed or vaporized on impact
- The Galileo spacecraft released a 339-kg probe into Jupiter's atmosphere in 1995. During the parachute-assisted descent, contact with the probe was lost when it overheated. The probe melted in the following hours. The main spacecraft stayed in orbit around Jupiter until 2003 when it was deliberately sent into Jupiter's atmosphere by ground controllers as a measure to prevent forward-contamination of the moon Europa, which may have a subsurface ocean, by any terrestrial microbes and radioactive waste. Lacking its probe's heat shield, it disintegrated upon entry in Jupiter's atmosphere in a matter of seconds.
- A projectile released by the Deep Impact probe struck the nucleus of Comet 9P/Tempel on July 4, 2005.
- The MESSENGER probe was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. It used up all its propellant after four years and crashed into the surface of Mercury on April 30, 2015.
Estimated total masses of objects
| Surface | Total estimated mass of objects (kg) |
|---|---|
| Churyumov–Gerasimenko | 100 |
| Eros | 487 |
| Itokawa | 0.591 |
| Jupiter | 2,564 |
| Mars | 9,303 |
| Mercury | 507.9 |
| The Moon | 180,244 |
| Titan | 319 |
| Venus | 22,642 |
| Tempel 1 | 370 |
| Total | 215,930 |
See also
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