The New Space Era

Hayabusa returned the first samples ever collected from an asteroid, from Itokawa, to Earth.

The car-sized Curiosity rover lands in Gale Crater using the daring sky-crane manoeuvre, beginning a long study of Mars's ancient habitability.

Voyager 1 crosses the heliopause and becomes the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, still returning data from beyond the Sun's bubble.

Rosetta's Philae lander made the first soft landing on the nucleus of a comet.

ESA's Rosetta becomes the first spacecraft to orbit a comet and, with its Philae lander, the first to soft-land on one — comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

After a nine-year journey, New Horizons sweeps past Pluto, revealing an astonishingly varied world and completing the first reconnaissance of the classical Solar System.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2 carries astronauts to the ISS, the first crewed orbital flight launched by a private company and the return of crewed launch to American soil.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2 was the first crewed orbital spaceflight launched by a private company.

Within months of each other, Japan's Hayabusa2 delivers samples of asteroid Ryugu to Earth and NASA's OSIRIS-REx collects a sample from asteroid Bennu, opening a new age of asteroid sample return.

The Ingenuity helicopter made the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another planet.

The tiny Ingenuity helicopter, carried by the Perseverance rover, lifts off from the surface of Mars — the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.

The James Webb Space Telescope launches and unfolds a giant segmented mirror a million miles from Earth, opening the infrared universe and the era of studying the first galaxies.