How the atlas is built

01 · Scope

Inclusion rules

The catalog covers missions launched from Earth whose primary objectives extend beyond it, crewed and uncrewed alike. Inclusion requires a stable mission identity, launch date, destination, status, and at least one authoritative institutional source.

The catalog is intentionally incomplete while the foundation is established. Absence is not a judgment about scientific importance, and uncertain optional measurements remain absent instead of being inferred.

02 · Evidence

Provenance

Sources are normalized records with an organization, title, URL, type, access date, and verification date. Missions, bodies, events, and future trajectory datasets refer to those source IDs so claims can be traced without copying citations between files.

Most records rest on NASA’s NSSDCA archive — more than every other publisher combined — with other NASA and ESA mission pages, JPL and NAIF technical records, and Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT behind it. Dates express only the precision stated by the source.

03 · Geometry

Trajectory quality

Availability and quality are separate, validated facts. A mission never receives 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.

Approximate

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

Unavailable

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

05 · Coverage

What the catalog currently contains

The catalog currently contains 144 missions, 15 celestial bodies, and 206 sources. Every number on this page is generated from the committed records, never written by hand.

Missions with a committed trajectory

2 of 144

Precise trajectories

2

Reconstructed trajectories

0

Approximate trajectories

0

Metadata fully sourced

137

Metadata needing review

7

Sources with verbatim excerpts

204 of 206

Destination batches inventoried

4 of 14

Trajectory coverage deliberately lags metadata coverage: a mission is catalogued once its record is sourced, not once a path exists for it. Absence of a trajectory is a stated fact about the data, not a gap in the mission’s history.

The catalog is not described as complete. Missions are researched in destination and program batches, and each batch records the candidates it considered and the reason for every exclusion, so coverage can be audited rather than asserted. Until that audit exists and passes, this page reports only what the records currently hold.

23 enumerated candidates are still unresolved. These are launched missions that an enumeration named but for which no obtainable primary source could be found; each records what was attempted. They are left open rather than excluded, because recording a real mission as out of scope for want of a source would be the more misleading answer.

06 · Publishing

Static-first architecture

Human-readable JSON records are validated with strict schemas, then compiled into a lightweight, deterministic mission index. Pages are server-rendered from committed data; only directory filtering runs in the browser.

Validation, index-drift checks, tests, and a production build run before release. This keeps the published snapshot reproducible and avoids a runtime scientific API.