Where's that spacecraft right now??

Spacecraft Flight Paths

Inter Planetary Spacecraft Positions

This page shows the positions of some of the inter planetary spacecraft that have been launched from the 1960's until present day. The data is provided by NASA's JPL website. This NASA site provides data for quite a few space missions but there are some which are not included or are not complete. Also the data does not look very far ahead for some ongoing missions and so temporary data is sometimes included to complete the missions when possible.

Because the data starts to become confused with so many spacecraft tracks shown, we have created separate pages, each showing one mission or as in the case of Pioneer and Voyager, one page showing closely occurring and similar missions.

Mission Pages:

See the flight paths and real time positions of these spacecraft:

• Mariner 2 Mission to Venus - the first successful interplanetary probe
• Pioneer and Voyager Missions to Outer Planets
• Voyager 1 and 2 - Animated Planetary Tour
• Galileo Mission to Jupiter
• Cassini Mission to Saturn
• Rosetta Mission to Comet 67P
• Messenger Mission to Mercury
• Dawn Mission to Vesta and Ceres
• New Horizons - Flight Path from Earth to Pluto
• New Horizons - Flight Path through Plutonian System
• Juno Mission to Jupiter
• Hayabusa2 Sample Retrieve Mission from Asteroid Ryugu
• OSIRIS-REx Sample Retrieve Mission from Asteroid Bennu
• ExoMars TGO flight Path to Mars

More missions to follow....

Spacecraft Flight paths... or how do you fly a spacecraft?

This video provides an explanation of spacecraft navigation including Newtons laws and gravitational assists.

Deep Space Network... or "How do we communicate with spacecraft in deep space?"

For a quick explanation watch this brief overview of NASA's the Deep Space network:

For a more leisurely and in-depth (but not too technical) presentation, watch the following video that discusses NASA's deep space network, how it works, how it's improved since the 1950's and where it's going in the future such as using light rather than radio waves.

This video is 50 minutes of presentation followed by 30 minutes of questions.