How to read this atlas
Astronomy is done from somewhere. This atlas is a complete inventory of those somewheres — every space-borne, surface-bound, balloon-flown, and rocket-launched platform that astronomers have actually published refereed papers from, organized by where it sat and what it measured.
The atlas reads top-to-bottom by distance from the Sun. The first stripe is the solar vicinity (Helios, Parker Solar Probe). The last is interstellar space (Voyager 1/2 beyond the heliopause). In between are seventeen vantage points where instruments have been parked: Mercury, Venus, the Sun-Earth Lagrange points, Earth orbit, sub-orbital Earth (balloons + sounding rockets + airborne), the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, the giant planets, the Kuiper Belt, comet rendezvous, and the heliosheath.
Each platform is a horizontal row within its vantage stripe, ordered chronologically by launch year. Reading down a stripe is reading the natural-history of vantage astronomy at that location — from Mariner 4 to MAVEN at Mars, from Uhuru to JWST at the Earth-system frontier.
Each platform's row has two halves. On the left sit four glyph columns flagging the in-situ modalities the platform carries: P for particles, F for fields, C for cosmic rays / ENAs, O for other (gravity, seismology, sample handling). A glyph appears only if the platform actually carries an instrument in that modality. On the right sits the platform's electromagnetic coverage, drawn against the same log-frequency spine that runs across the top of the atlas. Every photon-collecting instrument is a coloured segment placed at its true spectral range. Wide segments are wide-band cameras; narrow segments are line-tracking spectrographs or single-window monitors.
Operational platforms render solid. Retired platforms render hatched. Whether they retired six months ago or sixty years ago, the data they produced is still in the literature — and that literature is the litmus this atlas applies. A platform appears here if and only if astronomers or astrophysicists have published refereed work from it. Sounding-rocket Aerobee flights that found Sco X-1, Vela GRB-discovery papers, Skylab ATM solar physics, Apollo ALSEP magnetometers, BLAST balloon dust maps — they all qualify.
Click any row for the full instrument list, vantage notes, and date range. The detail panel persists until you click another row, the close button, or anywhere outside. Some platforms (Voyager 1/2, New Horizons, Cassini) appear in multiple stripes — once per vantage where they produced distinct data. That's the Voyager 2 row appearing in Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus / Neptune, and Heliosheath: same spacecraft, different frontier each time.
Methodology
This is a curated catalog, not an authoritative one. Inclusion criteria, in order of priority:
- Refereed publication test — was the platform's data used in a peer-reviewed astronomy / astrophysics / heliophysics / planetary-science paper? If yes, in. If the platform produced only engineering, navigation, communications, or pure Earth-observing data, out.
- Vantage requirement — the platform must have observed from above the bulk of Earth's atmosphere. That includes orbital, sub-orbital cruise, lunar / planetary surface, balloon (BLAST, BOOMERanG, EBEX class), airborne (KAO, SOFIA), and sounding-rocket programs that produced cataloged refereed data. Ground-based observatories are out (those are the Main Atlas).
- Body-of-orbit grouping — each platform sits in the stripe corresponding to where it produced its dominant data. Multi-encounter spacecraft (Voyager 1/2, Pioneer 10/11, Cassini, Galileo, New Horizons) appear once per stripe where they produced a distinct campaign of refereed papers.
Instrument bands are drawn at approximate nominal coverage — the goal is the at-a-glance density read, not radiometric precision. For radiometric ranges consult the cited mission references. Catalog entries flagged [verify] have at least one numeric ID (NORAD / COSPAR / Horizons) or operational status that needs cross-check against the live JPL Horizons / Celestrak feed.
The four in-situ glyph columns are deliberately binary: a platform either carries the modality or it doesn't. Subdividing further (DC magnetometer vs search-coil; thermal-ion vs suprathermal) would saturate the visual without proportionate science gain; the tooltip lists each instrument by name for the reader who needs the detail.
References & data sources
Master catalogs & ID services
- NSSDC Master Catalog — NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive,
nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/ - COSPAR International Designator — World Data Center for Satellite Information
- Celestrak / NORAD TLE catalog — Kelso T.S.,
celestrak.org - JPL Horizons — Giorgini J.D. et al.,
ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/ - HEASARC mission catalog — NASA HEASARC,
heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/missions.html - NASA / JPL Solar System Dynamics — Park R.S. et al.,
ssd.jpl.nasa.gov - ESA Science archive —
archives.esac.esa.int
Foundational platform papers (selected)
- Sco X-1 discovery — Giacconi R., Gursky H., Paolini F.R., Rossi B.B. 1962, PRL 9, 439 (Aerobee 150)
- Vela GRB discovery — Klebesadel R.W., Strong I.B., Olson R.A. 1973, ApJL 182, L85
- Uhuru (SAS-1) — Giacconi R. et al. 1971, ApJL 165, L27
- Pioneer 10 — Hall C.F. et al. 1974, Sci. 183, 301
- Voyager Mission overview — Stone E.C. 1977, Space Sci. Rev. 21, 75
- HEAO-2 / Einstein — Giacconi R. et al. 1979, ApJ 230, 540
- IRAS — Neugebauer G. et al. 1984, ApJ 278, L1
- IUE — Boggess A. et al. 1978, Nature 275, 372
- COBE — Mather J.C. et al. 1990, ApJL 354, L37
- HST — Lallo M.D. 2012, Opt. Eng. 51, 011011
- HEAO-1 / A1, A2, A4 — Wood K.S. et al. 1984, ApJS 56, 507
- Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory — Gehrels N. et al. 1993, A&AS 97, 5
- Chandra X-ray Observatory — Weisskopf M.C. et al. 2002, PASP 114, 1
- XMM-Newton — Jansen F. et al. 2001, A&A 365, L1
- Spitzer — Werner M.W. et al. 2004, ApJS 154, 1
- WMAP — Bennett C.L. et al. 2013, ApJS 208, 20
- Planck — Planck Collaboration 2020, A&A 641
- Herschel — Pilbratt G.L. et al. 2010, A&A 518, L1
- Kepler — Borucki W.J. et al. 2010, Sci. 327, 977
- Gaia — Gaia Collaboration 2016, A&A 595, A1
- JWST — Gardner J.P. et al. 2023, PASP 135, 068001
- Euclid — Laureijs R. et al. 2011, arXiv:1110.3193
- Parker Solar Probe — Fox N.J. et al. 2016, Space Sci. Rev. 204, 7
- Solar Orbiter — Müller D. et al. 2020, A&A 642, A1
- SOHO — Domingo V., Fleck B., Poland A.I. 1995, Solar Phys. 162, 1
- STEREO — Kaiser M.L. et al. 2008, Space Sci. Rev. 136, 5
- Helios 1/2 — Schwenn R., Marsch E. (eds.) 1990, Physics of the Inner Heliosphere, Springer
- Mariner 10 — Murray B.C. 1975, JGR 80, 2342
- Pioneer Venus — Colin L. 1980, JGR 85, 7575
- Magellan — Saunders R.S. et al. 1992, JGR 97, 13067
- Venus Express — Svedhem H. et al. 2007, P&SS 55, 1636
- Akatsuki — Nakamura M. et al. 2016, Earth Plan. Space 68, 75
- MESSENGER — Solomon S.C. et al. 2007, Space Sci. Rev. 131, 3
- Galileo at Jupiter — Russell C.T. (ed.) 1992, Space Sci. Rev. 60
- Cassini-Huygens — Matson D.L. et al. 2002, Space Sci. Rev. 104, 1
- Juno — Bolton S.J. et al. 2017, Sci. 356, 821
- New Horizons — Stern S.A. et al. 2015, Sci. 350, aad1815
- NEAR Shoemaker — Cheng A.F. 2002, Icarus 159, 1
- Hayabusa / Hayabusa2 — Tsuda Y. et al. 2013/2020, Acta Astronaut.
- Dawn — Russell C.T., Raymond C.A. 2011, Space Sci. Rev. 163, 3
- Rosetta — Glassmeier K.-H. et al. 2007, Space Sci. Rev. 128, 1
- OSIRIS-REx — Lauretta D.S. et al. 2017, Space Sci. Rev. 212, 925
- Lucy — Levison H.F. et al. 2021, PSJ 2, 171
- Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — Vondrak R. et al. 2010, Space Sci. Rev. 150, 7
- Chang'e program — Li C. et al. 2018, Space Sci. Rev. 214, 73
- Chandrayaan-1 / 2 / 3 — Goswami J.N., Annadurai M. 2009, Curr. Sci. 96, 486
- Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — Zurek R.W., Smrekar S.E. 2007, JGR 112, E05S01
- Mars Express — Chicarro A. et al. 2004, ESA SP-1240
- MAVEN — Jakosky B.M. et al. 2015, Space Sci. Rev. 195, 3
- Tianwen-1 — Wan W. et al. 2020, Nat. Astron. 4, 721
- Hope / EMM — Almatroushi H. et al. 2021, Space Sci. Rev. 217
- SOFIA — Young E.T. et al. 2012, ApJL 749, L17
- BLAST balloon — Pascale E. et al. 2008, ApJ 681, 400
- BOOMERanG — de Bernardis P. et al. 2000, Nature 404, 955
- Stratoscope II — Schwarzschild M. 1964, ApJ 139, 762
- Apollo ALSEP — Bates J.R., Lauderdale W.W., Kernaghan H. 1979, NASA RP-1036
- Skylab Apollo Telescope Mount — Tousey R. 1977, ARA&A 15, 1
Lifecycle & status
- Verified active as of 2026-05-09 via mission-page status pages, NASA / ESA / JAXA / ISRO / CNSA / KASI press feeds, and IAU Circulars where mission status is reported.
- Retired-with-graveyard-orbit entries (Herschel, Planck, WMAP, Gaia, Spitzer, Kepler) sourced from JPL Horizons closing-state ephemerides.
- Voyager 1 / 2 distance & status — NASA Heliophysics Division status page, last accessed 2026-05.