Discovery and exploration of the Solar System Earth to be orbited by an artificial satellite ("Luna 10"), followed by Mars in 1971 ("Mariner 9"), Venus in 1975 ("Venera 9"), Jupiter in 1995 ("Galileo"), the asteroid 433 Eros in 2000 ("NEAR Shoemaker"), Saturn in 2004 ("Cassini–Huygens"), and Mercury and Vesta in 2011 ("MESSENGER" and "Dawn" respectively). "Dawn" is orbiting the asteroid–dwarf planet Ceres as of 2015. The first probe to land on another Solar System body was the Soviet "Luna 2" probe, which impacted the Moon in 1959. Since then, increasingly distant planets have been reached, with probes landing on or impacting the surfaces of Venus in 1966
Outer Planet Flagship Mission Outer Planet Flagship Mission The Outer Planet Flagship Mission is a type of NASA program to research larger size missions to the outer solar system, and some examples of this type of mission are Galileo or Cassini-Huygens. In 2013 after encounter some technical issues and funding in the early 2010s, development was paused although overall research continued. One issue is the other big NASA missions such as in astrophysics and another is availability of RTG's One proposal was a joint mission between NASA and ESA to send a probe to study the icy satellites of the outer Solar System. There