Planet explorer
Fly through the Solar System
Every world wears real NASA surface photography. Drag to look around, scroll to zoom, and pick a planet to read its numbers, its moons and the odd fact worth remembering. Sizes and distances are compressed so everything fits on one screen.
Where we watch from
The instruments taking the pictures — parked on mountaintops, deserts and points of gravitational balance a million kilometres away.
James Webb Space Telescope
Sun–Earth L2, 1.5 million km out
Its sunshield keeps the mirrors near −233 °C so faint infrared light isn't drowned out.
Hubble Space Telescope
Low Earth orbit, 535 km up
It laps the Earth every 95 minutes and has done so since 1990.
Very Large Telescope
Cerro Paranal, Atacama Desert, Chile
Four 8.2 m telescopes can be combined into one interferometer.
Keck Observatory
Maunakea, Hawai‘i, 4,145 m
Each mirror is 36 hexagonal segments aligned to a few nanometres.
ALMA
Chajnantor Plateau, Chile, 5,000 m
66 movable dishes on one of the driest plateaus on Earth.
Event Horizon Telescope
Stations from Hawai‘i to the South Pole
Linking them makes an aperture the size of the planet.
Gaia
Sun–Earth L2 (retired 2025)
Charted positions for nearly two billion stars.
Extremely Large Telescope
Cerro Armazones, Chile (first light ~2029)
A 39 m mirror — bigger than all current 8–10 m giants combined.
Surface maps built from NASA imagery, courtesy of Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0).