Timeline of Solar System exploration
Wikimedia timeline
This is a timeline of Solar System exploration ordering events in the exploration of the Solar System by date of spacecraft launch.
It includes:
All spacecraft that have left Earth orbit for the purposes of Solar System exploration (or were launched with that intention but failed), including lunar probes.
A small number of pioneering or notable Earth-orbiting spacecraft.
It does not include:
Centuries of terrestrial telescopic observation.
The great majority of Earth-orbiting satellites.
Space probes leaving Earth orbit that are not concerned with Solar System exploration (such as space telescopes targeted at distant galaxies, cosmic background radiation observatories, and so on).
Probes that failed at launch.
The dates listed are launch dates, but the achievements noted may have occurred some time later—in some cases, a considerable time later (for example, Voyager 2, launched 20 August 1977, did not reach Neptune until 1989).
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
2020s
Planned or scheduled
See also
Discovery and exploration of the Solar System
Human presence in space
List of missions to the Moon
List of missions to Venus
List of missions to Mars
List of Solar System probes
List of interplanetary voyages
List of space telescopes
New Frontiers program
Out of the Cradle – 1984 book about scientific speculation on future missions.
“Timeline of Solar System exploration” enters the record as wikimedia timeline. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Timeline, Solar and System can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2368937. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1989 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Timeline of Solar System exploration” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.