How to read this atlas
Photons are how we see the Solar System. Atoms are how we know it. This atlas catalogues the missions that delivered atoms — either to Earth in a curation cleanroom, or to a spacecraft mass spectrometer on the body itself. Nearly sixty missions across eight parent bodies; an upper bound, give or take, on what humanity has physically touched.
The top bar is the heliocentric distance axis, in log10(AU). The Sun is to the left, Saturn's icy moons to the right. The eight planet markers and the asteroid-belt band are embedded as reference inside that axis.
Beneath the axis, every mission is a horizontal bar drawn over the parent body's heliocentric range — perihelion to aphelion, in log10(AU). Wide bars are wide-orbit bodies (comets running 1.6 → 5.7 AU, Parker Solar Probe diving 0.05 → 0.73 AU); narrow bars are tight-orbit bodies (Venus, Earth-Moon, Mars). Bars are grouped into rows by parent body and packed greedily so they don't overlap.
Within each bar, the saturated top fraction is the average literature mining depth across that mission's analytical layers — how much of what was acquired has been individually published, not just delivered to an archive. The lighter bottom fraction is the still-stored reservoir. Hover any bar for the layer summary; click any bar to expand the full breakdown, instrument list, and anchor papers.
Two structural facts to read off: the radial gap — Mercury, Uranus, and Neptune are still empty of in-situ sampling — and the lunar dominance, where the bulk of all returned mass and the deepest analytical literature still concentrate. This atlas is the editorial argument for both: where the next sample-return missions belong, and which bodies remain frontier-grade.
Returned vs in-situ — the epistemic difference
Returned-to-Earth analysis is open-ended. A 50-year-old Apollo basalt can be re-sliced and re-analysed today against techniques (CHIME, sub-grain ion probes, micro-XANES) that didn't exist when it was collected. Sample mass is a budget against which every future technique draws. Apollo 17's sealed drive-tube cores (73001/73002) were opened by JSC's ANGSA program and are still being mined in 2023–2026 with instruments that did not exist in 1972.
In-situ analysis is bounded by the instruments the mission flew. Curiosity's SAM mass spectrometer can look for organics that flight-time engineers anticipated; it cannot be reconfigured for an unanticipated isotope ratio. Once the mission ends, the analytical record is closed. But in-situ sampling reaches material that cannot be returned at scale: the surface of Venus (Venera 13/14 XRF on basalt, 1982), the deep atmosphere of Jupiter (Galileo Probe 1995), the plumes of Enceladus (Cassini INMS through-passes, 2005–2015), the corona of the Sun (Parker Solar Probe, ongoing).
The two modes are complementary, not redundant: in-situ samples whatever returns are too expensive to attempt, and returned samples preserve everything in-situ instruments could not anticipate. The atlas mixes both because the question — has this body's matter ever been individually analysed? — gets the same yes either way.
Methodology — bar geometry and analytical depth
x-position. Each mission sits at its sample's heliocentric distance, in log10(AU). Lunar missions cluster at log10(1.0) = 0; Mars missions at log10(1.52) ≈ 0.18; Venera at log10(0.72) ≈ −0.14; Saturn-system missions at log10(9.5) ≈ 0.98. Solar-wind samplers (Genesis, Parker, Helios, Solar Orbiter, Ulysses) sit at the heliocentric distance of the spacecraft during sampling, not the Sun's surface.
x-extent (bar width). Each bar spans the parent body's heliocentric range — perihelion to aphelion in log10(AU) — exactly as the main RAVEN Atlas's bars span an archive's frequency coverage. For tight-orbit bodies whose perihelion–aphelion range is narrower than 36 px on the master axis (Venus, Earth-Moon, Mars, the inner-system asteroids and outer-system Saturnian moons), the bar is min-clamped to 36 px and centered on the body's anchor. For wide-orbit bodies — Parker Solar Probe's 0.05 → 0.73 AU dive, Wild 2's 1.6 → 5.3 AU comet orbit, Ulysses's 1.3 → 5.4 AU polar tour — the bar physically traces that range across the master axis.
Yield, separately. Sample mass (for returned) or operational days at body (for in-situ) is recorded per mission and surfaced in the tooltip and detail card. v1 visually-encoded yield as bar width; v2 reverts to the main-atlas convention where bar width is the body's spectral footprint and yield is metadata.
Saturation top fraction. Each mission has a set of analytical layers — instruments deployed in situ, or analytical regimes for returned samples (bulk geochem / isotopes / mineralogy / organics / ages). Each layer carries a processing level p and a mining depth m in [0, 1]. The bar's top is the average m across its layers; the lighter remainder is the unread reservoir. Confidence flags (high / med / low) reflect whether the m value is anchored on a published bibliometric proxy or on a curator override.
Greedy row-packing. Within each parent-body group, bars are sorted by left edge and packed greedily into vertical rows. Bodies with many missions (the Moon, Mars) take more rows than bodies with one or two (Jupiter, Titan, Enceladus).
Inclusion criteria. A mission qualifies if it physically interacted with material from a Solar System body and produced quantitative geochemical, isotopic, mineralogical, or compositional data on that material. Spacecraft-mediated sampling only — naturally-delivered meteorites with confirmed parent-body provenance (HEDs → Vesta, SNCs → Mars, lunar meteorites → Moon) are powerful but live on a separate page in v3. Pure orbital remote sensing (MESSENGER X-ray fluorescence at Mercury, Mars Odyssey GRS, Chandrayaan-1 M³) is excluded — those are remote chemistry through photons, not in-situ contact with atoms.
References & data sources
- NASA Lunar Sample Compendium — JSC Astromaterials Acquisition & Curation Office
- Apollo 11–17 — LSPET 1969–1973, Science; Wolfe et al. 1981, USGS Prof. Paper 1080
- Apollo 15 Genesis Rock (15415) — Meyer 2010, Lunar Sample Compendium; Borg et al. 1999, GCA 63, 2679 (Sm–Nd, FAN 62236)
- Apollo 17 ANGSA — Shearer et al. 2023, Sci. Adv. 9, eadf6973
- Luna 16 / 20 / 24 — Vinogradov 1971/1973; Barsukov 1977
- Chang'e 5 — Li et al. 2021, Nature 600, 54; Che et al. 2021, Science 374, 887
- Chang'e 6 — Li et al. 2024, Natl. Sci. Rev. 11, nwae328; CNSA mission documentation
- Hayabusa / Itokawa — Nakamura T. et al. 2011, Science 333, 1113; Yurimoto et al. 2011, Science 333, 1116
- Hayabusa2 / Ryugu — Yada et al. 2022, Nat. Astron. 6, 214; Yokoyama et al. 2023, Science 379, abn7850; Naraoka et al. 2023, Science 379, eabn9033
- OSIRIS-REx / Bennu — Lauretta et al. 2017, SSR 212, 925; Lauretta et al. 2024, Meteoritics & PS; Glavin et al. 2025, Nat. Astron.
- Stardust / Wild 2 — Brownlee et al. 2006, Science 314, 1711; Zolensky et al. 2006, Science 314, 1735; Westphal et al. 2014, Science 345, 786
- Genesis / solar wind — Burnett et al. 2003, SSR 105, 509; McKeegan et al. 2011, Science 332, 1528
- Parker Solar Probe — Fox et al. 2016, SSR 204, 7; Bale et al. 2019, Nature 576, 237
- Solar Orbiter — Müller et al. 2020, A&A 642, A1
- Helios 1/2 — Schwenn & Marsch 1990 (collected results)
- Ulysses — Wenzel et al. 1992; McComas et al. 2008
- ACE / Wind — Stone et al. 1998 (ACE); Acuña et al. 1995 (Wind)
- Surveyor 5/6/7 — Turkevich et al. 1968, Science 162, 117 (alpha-scattering)
- Lunokhod 1/2 — Vinogradov et al. 1971; Surkov 1990
- Chang'e 3 + Yutu — Ling et al. 2015, Nat. Comm. 6, 8880; Xiao et al. 2015, Science 347, 1226
- Chang'e 4 + Yutu-2 — Li et al. 2019, Nature 569, 378 (mantle material)
- Chandrayaan-3 + Pragyan — Vadawale et al. 2024, Nature 633, 327 (APXS); ISRO mission documentation
- Venera 8 — Vinogradov et al. 1973 (gamma-ray on regolith)
- Venera 9 / 10 — Surkov et al. 1976
- Venera 11 / 12 — Istomin et al. 1980 (atmospheric mass spectrometry)
- Venera 13 / 14 — Surkov et al. 1984, JGR 89, B393 (XRF basalt)
- Vega 1 / 2 — Surkov et al. 1986; Sagdeev et al. 1986 (balloons)
- Viking 1 / 2 GCMS — Biemann et al. 1977, JGR 82, 4641
- Mars Pathfinder / Sojourner APXS — Rieder et al. 1997, Science 278, 1771
- Spirit / Opportunity APXS — Gellert et al. 2006, JGR 111, E02S05
- Spirit / Opp Mössbauer — Klingelhöfer et al. 2004, Science 306, 1740
- Phoenix WCL — Hecht et al. 2009, Science 325, 64 (perchlorates)
- Phoenix TEGA — Boynton et al. 2009, Science 325, 61 (water ice)
- Curiosity SAM — Mahaffy et al. 2012, SSR 170, 401; Eigenbrode et al. 2018, Science 360, 1096 (organics)
- Curiosity CheMin — Blake et al. 2012, SSR 170, 341; Vaniman et al. 2014, Science 343, 1243262
- Perseverance PIXL / SHERLOC — Allwood et al. 2020, SSR 216, 134; Bhartia et al. 2021, SSR 217, 58; Farley et al. 2022, Science 377, eabo2196
- Zhurong MarSCoDe + RoPeR — Li et al. 2022, Nature 610, 308 (subsurface stratigraphy)
- NEAR-Shoemaker on Eros — Trombka et al. 2000, Science 289, 2101 (X-ray/gamma)
- MASCOT on Ryugu — Jaumann et al. 2019, Science 365, 817
- Philae on 67P (COSAC + Ptolemy) — Goesmann et al. 2015, Science 349, aab0689; Wright et al. 2015, Science 349, aab0673
- Deep Impact on Tempel 1 — A'Hearn et al. 2005, Science 310, 258
- Galileo Probe at Jupiter — Niemann et al. 1996, Science 272, 846 (atmospheric mass spec)
- Cassini through Enceladus plume — Waite et al. 2009, Nature 460, 487; Postberg et al. 2018, Nature 558, 564 (organics)
- Huygens at Titan — Niemann et al. 2005, Nature 438, 779; Lebreton et al. 2005, Nature 438, 758
- Lunar chronology calibration — Stöffler & Ryder 2001, SSR 96, 9; Neukum, Ivanov & Hartmann 2001, SSR 96, 55
- Three-isotope oxygen plot — Clayton 1993, ARE&PS 21, 115
- JPL Small-Body Database — Itokawa, Ryugu, Bennu, Eros, 67P, Wild 2, Tempel 1 orbital elements
- JPL Horizons — heliocentric distances at sampling epochs
- Sample-allocation policies — NASA CAPTEM; JAXA ESCuC; CNSA Lunar Sample Management Office; GEOKHI Vernadsky Institute