Deep Space Missions

The Artemis campaign represents the modern vanguard of deep space exploration. Through the combined power of the Space Launch System (SLS) super heavy-lift rocket, the Orion crew spacecraft, commercial Human Landing Systems (SpaceX Starship HLS & Blue Origin Blue Moon), and the Gateway lunar outpost, Artemis establishes permanent human and robotic presence at the water-ice rich Lunar South Pole.

JWST is the premier space observatory of the 21st century. Equipped with a 6.5-meter gold-coated beryllium primary mirror and a 5-layer tennis-court-sized sunshield, JWST operates at cryogenic temperatures below 50 Kelvin to detect redshifted light from galaxies formed less than 300 million years after the Big Bang.

Perseverance is a car-sized robotic astrobiologist exploring Jezero Crater, an ancient Martian lake and river delta system that dried up over 3.5 billion years ago. The rover is equipped with an advanced coring drill, robotic sample caching assembly, and an array of spectrometers analyzing mineralogy and organic compounds.

Europa Clipper is the largest planetary spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission. Spanning more than 30 meters with its solar arrays unfurled, Clipper will execute nearly 50 close flybys of Europa to map its ice crust thickness, sample atmospheric plumes, and analyze the saline ocean beneath.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 transformed our understanding of the outer solar system before crossing the heliopause—the magnetic boundary where the solar wind gives way to the interstellar interstellar gas of the Milky Way.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA's next-generation astrophysics flagship observatory. With a 2.4-meter telescope and an unprecedented 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument, Roman provides the same razor-sharp clarity as Hubble but with a field of view 100 times greater.