About Mission Atlas

Coverage

What the catalog contains

The catalog covers crewed and uncrewed missions launched from Earth. Each record needs a stable mission identity, launch date, status, and at least one authoritative institutional source. Core records also need a celestial-body destination; evidence-backed extended-scope observatories may instead document a non-body scientific domain.

This snapshot contains 308 missions, 82 celestial bodies, and 2,019 sources. These figures are generated from the committed records rather than written by hand.

Data handling

How data is handled

Sources are normalized records with an organization, title, URL, type, access date, and verification date. Missions, bodies, events, and trajectory datasets refer to those source IDs so each claim can be traced to its evidence.

208 missions have expanded position coverage. The original detailed archive contains 6 trajectory datasets. Availability and quality are separate facts: a mission does not receive a path merely because its route is commonly understood.

Precise

Generated from authoritative navigation or ephemeris data with explicit provenance.

Reconstructed

Derived from authoritative records, with documented processing and limitations.

Physically reconstructed

Created from publicly available mission data using documented physics, engineering, geometry, and numerical methods. It is not an observed telemetry value.

Approximate

A simplified, sourced representation suitable for orientation, not navigation.

Predicted

A navigation provider’s planned or extrapolated solution, identified separately from reconstructed flight.

Estimated

A bounded interpolation between sourced position and velocity constraints, with its assumptions retained.

Unavailable

No verified trajectory dataset is committed, so the atlas renders no path.

Visual sources

Models and mapped surfaces

Spacecraft models and planetary maps include assets from the NASA 3D Resources collection and its contributors. Earth’s surface uses NASA Earth Observatory’s Blue Marble. The Moon map is from NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, Ernie Wright, with LROC/LOLA data. The 67P shape and Philae’s mapped site use ESA Rosetta, OSIRIS, LAM, PSI and PDS scientific products.

Simplified spacecraft constructions preserve mission-specific structures. Sizes and source limitations are recorded with each asset. Surface maps are static; clouds and unsupported spacecraft pointing are illustrative.