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
Timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their moons Jupiter using numbers while the names suggested by his rival Simon Marius gradually gained universal acceptance. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) eventually started officially approving names in the late 1970s.</onlyinclude> In the following tables, planetary satellites are indicated in bold type (e.g. Moon) while planets and dwarf planets, which directly circle the Sun, are in italic type (e.g. "Earth"). The Sun itself is indicated in roman type. The tables are sorted by publication/announcement date. Dates are annotated with the following symbols: In a few cases, the date is uncertain and is then marked "(?)". "* Note: Moons marked by an