Talk:List of Solar System probes

Proposal to rename and extend scope

I propose that this page is renamed "List of space missions" (or something similar) as it includes non-planetary missions (sun, moon, asteroids, comets). Also propose it is extended to include things like Apollo, ISS, MIR, Skylab etc. - basically everything except satellite launches after they became routine. There doesn't seem to be any other comprehensive list of space missions all in one place (unless I missed it?), and it would be good to have one. Any thoughts? Matt 12:55, 17 September 2006 (UTC).

There are some technical difficulties with regard to deciding where to draw the line once we get away from interplanetary probes, and it looks like a bit of a Pandora's box. An exception are the Apollo missions to the moon which can easily be added to the Lunar probes section. After that, we have: manned earth orbiting missions, shuttle missions, geostationary satellites, low earth orbit satellites, objects sent to Earth-Moon Lagrangian points. Some of the difficulties are

1. How do we choose at which date do we cut off. e.g. should Sputnik be included?
2. At what height of orbit should we cut off. Presumably geostationary satellites are out, but this would also eliminate all manned missions excepto for a subset of the Apollos.
3. How do we count manned orbital missions if we were to include them. E.g. there have been over a hundred space shuttle flights; what about the ISS, Mir etc.- are they counted as a single mission? What about the Soyuz launches to supply Mir and the ISS?

Deuar 16:37, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

I think that a common-sense "as-we-go" approach should be adopted, rather than trying to lay down strict rules in advance; I'm quite happy to voice an opinion, for what it's worth, on individual cases. Regarding the points you mention, my own view is that:

• The Shuttle programme should be mentioned, but the individual launches can be handled by a link to List of space shuttle missions. We don't need to list them all here.
• The Soyuz programme should be mentioned, with a link to Soyuz programme for the detail of all the launches.
• "Space stations" (Skylab, Mir, ISS) should definitely be included. There's no need to get too hung up on whether it's counted as a single "mission", we can just have a subsection called "Space Stations" and list them there. I don't think that will confuse anyone. (Or maybe a better article title would be something like "Summary of Activities in Space", rather than "List of Space Missions"?)
• Sputnik should definitely be individually mentioned, as should any other satellite launches of especial historical or scientific importance, such as Telstar. Later routine satellite launches can be handled with a note, perhaps giving an estimate of the total number of launches and types (e.g. comms, spy, mapping, GPS, scientific research etc.) and links to other articles where the details are listed, if that information is available.
• The Apollo programme should very definitely be mentioned, as should the Gemini and Mercury programmes (which are just another couple I happened to think of at random!)

Matt 22:39, 18 September 2006 (UTC).

This looks like a list of all non-commercial space flights. It is likely a desirable thing to have, but I'm doubtful whether it should all be here − it's just that the present planetary probe list is already very long! A separate "list of space missions to Earth orbit" would be the better solution in my opinion. (the two such "sister" articles could mention each other at the top). Deuar 20:25, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I'm having a rethink about this too. What I really want is a summary list of all "space activities" in one place - and not broken down by planet so that each flight potentially appears multiple times, as is the case in this article. So probably a separate article would be the answer. It would probably be shorter than this one. For example, a few of the entries would simply be something roughly like this:

Programme/Mission	Country/Agency	Main objective(s)	Type	Launch date(s)
Sputnik program	Soviet Union	Placing satellites in earth orbit	Unmanned	1957–60
Apollo program	NASA	Moon landings	Manned	1967–72
Voyager program	NASA	Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune flybys	Unmanned	1977

If I get round to it I may have a go. Thanks for helping me to crystallise my thoughts! Matt 22:00, 19 September 2006 (UTC).

Now that sounds like a really useful list to me too. Have fun! :-) Deuar 15:08, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, digging around further, I see that there are already literally dozens of Wikipedia articles that contain various lists of space activities (some of them overlapping), which I was not aware of. I don't think any useful purpose would be served by adding yet another one! Oh well... Matt 14:00, 22 September 2006 (UTC).

Suggestions for new article title

The title of this article (List of planetary probes) is clearly wrong given its contents. In fact it lists every mission that left Earth orbit, whether to a planet, to the moon, to an asteroid or comet, or for the purposes of solar or general astronomical observation. My best suggestion is List of solar system probes. Any better ideas? Matt 22:31, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

We are all part of the Solar System, so a medical probe investigating human lungs is in fact also a solar system probe.

The Moon is orbiting the Earth, so lunar landers haven't "left Earth orbit".

Often the Moon-Earth system is called a 'double planet', so List of planetary probes is OK.

These probes have to cruise the 'interplanetary space', so why not List of interplanetary probes?

If List of Solar System probes is choosen, Solar System must be with capital 'S', since it is a toponym. --Necessary Evil 23:22, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I am confident there will be no confusion with probes investigating human lungs. I do actually prefer your suggestion List of interplanetary probes, but, regardless of double-planet technicalities, I do not think many people would expect "(inter)planetary probes" to include lunar missions. In fact, in my view a lunar probe definitely isn't an "(inter)planetary probe". Some of the solar missions listed aren't either. However, List of Solar System probes is ugly, so I don't know... Matt 23:53, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I have a book: "Anthony Wilson: Solar System Log, 1987, Jane's Publ., ISBN 0-7106-0444-0" describing all lunar, planetary and cometary probes. It even has interstellar probes like the Voyagers, so to me List of Solar System probes isn't ugly. And as you kind of wrote, many people expect that spacecraft leaving the Earth to other celestial bodies are "out in the Solar System". --Necessary Evil 00:24, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

I finally got round to doing this. Matt 01:48, 9 October 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Another Matt (talk • contribs)

Proposed probes

I see that missions still in concept are not to be listed, but is there a place to list proposals such at the TAU mission? DougHill 17:44, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Merge proposal

I wondering if it would be a good idea to merge Timeline of Solar System exploration with this article. I know that this is sorted by date within target, and the timeline is just sorted by date, but otherwise the information seems to be entirely duplicated (apart from a handful of very early earth-orbiters). Is it worth maintaining two lists just for the sake of this difference? I'm not entirely sure, so what do others think? Note also the discussion immediately above about renaming this article. Matt 01:06, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the duplication of work is annoying. I do however see three advantages that Timeline of Solar System exploration has, which I'd like to see addressed before any merge:

1. As you noted, it's sorted by date. I especially rely on being able to see "what are the recent missions" at a glance.
2. It has the 1st XXXX entries.
3. It's much shorter (about a third the length measured in pages), which I find makes it easier to use for browsing rather than lookup.

An article on "missions currently active" could somewhat mitigate the effects of my first point, though it would still be only a partial solution. The 1st XXXX issue could be dealt with by expanding List of space exploration milestones, 1957-1969 to include all dates, and perhaps adding a summary of "major milestones" so it's easier to scan quickly.

Do you agree with me that the biggest problem with keeping separate articles is duplication of work? If that's the motivating factor here, maybe we can find some way to base both articles off the same data set. This sounds like a task for a database and query system, but WP doesn't quite work like that. I'm not sure if there's any good way to accomplish something similar on WP, at least not without massive abuse of the templating system.

vasi 11:40, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it's the duplication of work that's annoying, and it seems to be endemic in these spaceflight list articles. I've made a number of enhancements to some of these from time to time, and then just when I've made a change in one place I find another two or three articles that list essentially exactly the same information but "sliced and diced" in a slightly different way. As you say, a database solution would be ideal. Then a large number of these spaceflight list articles could be based on just one set of data. How that could happen in Wikipedia, if at all, I really have no idea though. I believe there is a facility to create sortable tables, but I'm not sure if it's sophisticated enough to cope with what we want to do here. I pretty much agree with all your other points too... Matt 13:25, 5 June 2007 (UTC).

One solution to some of these problems could be to use a sortable table http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Table#Sorting but as far as I know these are still in the early stages of development and are a little hard to read sbandrews (t) 11:03, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Spacecraft	Date	Destination	Country	Type
Sputnik 1	1957	Earth	USSR	Orbiter
Sputnik 2	1958	Earth	USSR	Orbiter
Mariner 2	1962	Venus	USA	Flyby
Mariner 4	1964	Mars	USA	Flyby
Hubble Space Telescope	1990	Earth	USA	Orbiting Telescope

Partial success vs. Partial failure

What is the difference between partial success and partial failure (compare Genesis with Sakigake Halley flyby)? I ask because partial success is shaded grey but partial failure is left unshaded. I'd suggest that we don't have partial failures only failures, since anything that didn't fail can be viewed as a partial success. ThreeBlindMice 21:10, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, there shouldn't be any "partial failures". There should only be "success", "partial success" and "failure". "Success" and "partial success" should be shaded, and "failure" shouldn't. I've changed the remaining instances of "partial failure". Matt 22:38, 18 May 2007 (UTC).

Thanks for taking care of this (I was quite willing to make the changes myself but wanted to know if there was some distinction I was missing prior to doing so). ThreeBlindMice 17:44, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

They took away the partial failure status.Wiki47o — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wiki74o (talk • contribs) 03:56, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Removal of "incomplete list" warning

I've been all the way through this list, and added a number of new entries, and as far as I can see it's pretty much complete. It's hard to say with absolute certainty that nothing is omitted, but I feel confident enough about it that it doesn't need the warning. However, if anyone still has concerns please put it back. I decided not to add some really quite speculative proposals still at concept stage, and put a note to that effect at the start of the list. Matt 02:35, 20 May 2007 (UTC).

Image deletion

Image:VSE 2013.jpg is listed on proposed deletions. John Vandenberg 13:14, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Cancelled probes

This list contained a scattering of "cancelled" missions. In fact, a large number of missions are proposed all the time, some quite notable (e.g. the Planetary Grand Tour); only a minority of these proposed missions ever make it to the launch pad. No criteria are given for determining which of the very large number of proposed missions are to be included on this list. As many of the missions marked as "cancelled" are recent, I surmise that they were placed on the list as "future missions" and then marked "cancelled" when the mission failed to materialize, instead of being removed from the list. In light of WP:NOT#CRYSTAL, it's doubtful that "future missions" should be included, at least before it is certain that they will be launched. I have, however, limited myself to removing the "cancelled" missions from the list, as they serve no purpose. RandomCritic 15:54, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

• I agree that the cancelled missions should go. Future missions should be included once it is reasonably certain that they will be launched. Certainty can never be 100%. We do not need to get too hung up on a precise definition of "reasonably certain": I'm sure we can make sensible decisions. Matt 01:41, 8 October 2007 (UTC). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.133.214.228 (talk)

Dates

The date column in this list has always annoyed me. In some cases it's kind of natural to assume it's the launch date, and I think one or two might have been incorrectly changed to launch date. Then there are launch failures which are supposedly meant to list the launch date but sometimes seem to show the planned rendezvous date (which never happened), and various other anomalies. I think it would be much less confusing to have two date columns: launch date, and then the date of rendezvous (or however we want to term it), which is currently the date that is (usually) listed at the moment. That could be just left blank if the thing blew up. The problem is that the table will get wider, and we might have problems making it fit well on a standard monitor. Perhaps we could get rid of the pictures, which I'm guessing are one reason why this page is so painfully slow to load. Anyway, the pictures are almost always on the main article page, which is just one click away, and they're too small to see here so you need to click on something anyway... Or, do we have to take up so much space spelling out the dates in full? Can we just write them in the format like "10-Dec-03"? Thoughts? Matt 02:56, 11 December 2007 (UTC).

Hi, the french page has no picture, loading is better: [1] Groslard (talk) 06:07, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Addition

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a "current status" listed for each of the probes (e.g. crashed, lost, heliocentric orbit)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.145.179.186 (talk) 07:30, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

There is a separate article that aims to do this: List of probes by operational status. Having multiple list articles "slicing and dicing" exactly the same data in different ways is far from ideal -- what we really need is one big table with lots of fields and then some kind of SQL-type syntax to retrieve the required data and sort and format it appropriately, but in Wikipedia there doesn't seem to be any way to do this. Matt 03:10, 19 December 2007 (UTC). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.134.53.193 (talk)

Cancelled missions (again)

I notice that some cancelled missions have crept back in. I don't feel fanatically strongly about this, but last time we had this discussion (above), the two people who expressed an opinion thought they shouldn't be included. Perhaps it's worth reopening that debate. If we do decide that they are to remain, then I think we should at least try to come up with some criteria for inclusion. I mean, how far back are we going to go? There must be hundreds of cancelled missions if we go right back to the 1960s. Are we only including notable cancelled missions? Notable recent cancelled missions? Missions that got quite a long way before being cancelled? Something else? Matt 23:46, 29 February 2008 (UTC).

• Since there have been no comments in a long time, and, in particular, no suggestions about how to define inclusion criteria, I have deleted the cancelled probes once again. Matt 22:37, 13 May 2008 (UTC). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.134.53.167 (talk)

Close to a featured list

Great work here! Ought to become a featured list with a little more work on the introduction and standardized referencing. Durova^Charge! 07:08, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Lunar Probes section is very long.

I think that the [Lunar Probes] section is rather large. I'll suggest that we split it in two sub sections for the sake of simplicity. We could call the sub sections, I don’t know, Cold War and Post Cold War - that is a natural transition. The present section is a bit unforeseeable in the editing window because you have to roll down hundred lines to edit today's Lunar probes. --Regards, Necessary Evil (talk) 08:49, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Silence is Consent! Now I've done it. --Regards, Necessary Evil (talk) 20:57, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Could we include distances of closest approaches?

Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:41, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Move Lunar Probes?

Because the Lunar Probes section is such a large part of this list -- a third or more of its total length -- I wonder if it wouldn't be appropriate to move it to its own list (e.g. List of lunar probes) with a link left in the current place it holds. Does anyone have strong feelings about this one way or another? RandomCritic (talk) 17:00, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

"habitability"

The only problem I have with the MSL description "investigation of past and present habitability, climate and geology" is that "habitability" to me sounds like it is concerned with human habitability. 86.176.213.103 (talk) 01:37, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Asteroid probes and mission architectures

I note the good list of Asteroid probes in this article. It appears to be limited currently to

1. "Missions or flybys completed successfully (or partially successfully)
2. Failed or cancelled missions
3. Missions en route or in progress (including mission extensions)
4. Planned missions

But would appreciate help in finding the place in Wikipedia that early (but serious and funded) asteroid probe proposals should be covered in Wikipedia, perhaps without creating a separate article for each notable/funded study. I've looked and not found a place for that information.

So that leads to a question: is it considered in-scope for this "List of..." article to have such funded/proposed/mission-architecture-studies/etc. covered here, by adding a row to the table? Or is there another/better Wikipedia article to address this? Cheers. N2e (talk) 13:55, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Regarding Mangalyaan

After seeing the articles and notes about them in the section Earth flybys, I think Mangalyaan had also performed a similar operation for gravity assist. I am not sure about the details though. If someone would be kind enough to see the details and add them then I would b highly grateful. Regards. - Jayadevp13 06:47, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Messenger intentionally impacted?

On the list of Mercury probes it says Messenger was intentionally impacted at the end. NASA spent every bit of fuel trying to keep it in orbit, the impact was unavoidable, not intended. Loren Pechtel (talk) 15:47, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Change color for cancelled/failed probes to red

It's hard to distinguish cancelled and failed missions from planned missions with the current grey/white distinction. I think a pale red would make more sense and make the charts easier to read. If no one has any objections within a week or two, I'll plan on switching the colors. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:11, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Problem with duplicated content

Originally, Earth flybys and Lunar probes were included in this article. Then someone decided to hive these off to separate articles, List of Earth flybys and List of lunar probes. Then, back in February 2015, another editor made this extremely unhelpful edit which appears to have copied all the content from List of Earth flybys and List of lunar probes back into this article, while leaving the other two articles intact. No one seems to have spotted this, and two versions of this large chunk of content appear to have been separately maintained for getting on for two years. Now the problem is to unpick this total fuckup and merge the two separate versions of this content back into one. 86.185.218.185 (talk) 20:51, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

• OK, to prevent the mess getting worse, i.e. prevent the two versions continuing to be maintained separately and potentially diverging further, I have for now simply deleted the duplication in this article. 81.152.193.239 (talk) 20:34, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Suggestion: keep the headings for Earth flybys and Lunar missions, but have the link to the full article be the only content under the heading, in case people expect that info to still be here.Astrofreak92 (talk) 22:21, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

That is indeed what I have done. Personally I would not oppose bringing all the content back into this article, but possibly it was split off because the article was thought to be getting too large. 81.152.193.239 (talk) 22:47, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

@86.185.218.185 and 81.152.193.239: Whoever you are, thanks! This is a logical split, page looks much better and is easier to handle now. — JFG ^talk 13:40, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Not all objects are probes

As defined at Space probe article: "Space probe is a robotic spacecraft that does not orbit the Earth, but, instead, explores further into outer space." The Tesla car has been removed from this list because it is not a robotic probe, it is not a spacecraft, and it has no scientific payload to probe nor explore anything. It is a dead weight without battery and it became junk just hours after the rocket test. It is however, an artificial object in space, so it is already listed at List of artificial objects in heliocentric orbit. Cheers, BatteryIncluded (talk) 16:39, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Table with countries first

First to orbit and first leaving Earth's gravitational well. 205.175.106.45 (talk) 22:19, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

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