The first spacecraft to visit Mars was Mariner 4 in 1965.
100 Mind-Blowing Spacecraft Facts
It would take 450 million years for a modern spacecraft to reach the centre of our galaxy.
The Apollo missions have left 96 bags of poop, pee, and vomit on the moon. Back in 1969, mankind made history by walking on the moon for the first time. That wasn’t the only first that happened on that momentous trip – it was also the first time literal trash was dumped on the moon. Subsequent voyages to the moon followed suit, leaving behind all their unwanted trash, but it turns out that’s all for a good reason – the returning spacecraft don’t have enough fuel to carry all that weight back!
The dark region on the north pole of Pluto’s moon, Charon, is called Mordor. In July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to fly past Pluto, the formerly ninth planet in our solar system. NASA called on the general public to aid them in giving names to the many new features of Pluto they expected to find, and the general public certainly didn’t disappoint. Not only did they name a dark spot on Charon’s moon after Sauron’s holdout in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but they also named a dark spot on Pluto’s south pole Cthulu from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos!