aside from landing on the moon (everyone will pick that if I don’t exclude that)what do you think is the coolest NASA mission?

32 comments

1. That one to Europa where they drilled into the ice and found a bunch of cool life forms but then told us not to tell anyo-…

   …uh…I mean…the *second* time they landed on the moon.

2. Powered flight on another planet (mars) is also pretty cool.

3. Probably DART where they hit an asteroid

4. Hi, Grapp!

   I’m old fashioned: Voyager 2

5. Voyager 1. Heck of a achievement to leave our Solar System and still occasionally contact us.

6. Apollo 13. They didn’t land on the moon, but it was incredible feat to get them home

7. Pathfinder – the first Mars rover (Sojourner).

   Or perhaps the first time a crew lived on the International Space Station. That’s one of the most impressive technological achievements in human history. Not solely a NASA mission, though.

8. Probably either OSIRIS-REx or the first space shuttle mission. The fact that they landed on a asteroid and return it to earth is insane. The first space shuttle mission had a 1 in 9 chance of catastrophic failure(for the first Spacex- manned launch it was 1 in 276) and yet they survived the launch. In hindsight this was a telling sign for what was to come for the space shuttle but the balls the astronauts had to have to attempt this is something that is extraordinary.

9. Bringing Mark Watney home from Mars after everything that went wrong on the Aries 3 mission.

10. Removing that small black hole from the L4 Lagrange point back in 2017. It coincided with the eclipse in the US, so it didn’t get the attention it deserved.

11. – [OSIRIS-REx](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/osiris-rex/)

    Similarly to Japan’s [Hyabusa](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/hayabusa), it landed on and brought back a sample from an asteroid. What’s interesting about this one though is that it dropped off the material and continued on to become the OSIRIS-APEX mission, where it will explore the asteroid Apophis.

12. Deep [Impact](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/deep-impact-epoxi/)! A 4th of July impact and subsequent flyby of a comet. how cool is that!!!!

13. Voyager was ingenious on so many levels. Using 1970s tech.

14. Fuck all you space brained people, clearly the aeronautics part of the national aeronautics and space administration is the coolest bit.

    Their thrust vectoring and sonic boom reduction work is the coolest thing they’ve ever done outside of landing on the Moon. All the space stuff they don’t even do themselves, they farm it out to universities and corporations to actually accomplish the task. Most the in-house NASA design stuff has been complete letdowns.

15. I’m going to go off board here and go with something D.O.D. and say the NAVSTAR missions .

    Quite literally changed the world with those. The amount of commerce created, lives saved or otherwise made better, and things even made possible because of them is simply astonishing.

16. James Webb is currently top of my list but I’m a sucker for recency bias.

17. The Voyager missions. Got amazing pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and were the first man-made objects to leave the solar system.

18. Pizza Hut when they sent Pizza to the International Space Station, Truly no one outpizzas the Hut!

19. Mars rover

20. If i remember correctly, I think NASA has done 17/19 of all missions to the Gas giants, and did another in cooperation with the ESA and/or Japan.

21. The new one where they smashed a probe into a fucking asteroid, that’s amazing to me

22. Hubble

23. New Horizons. hands down.

24. Landing on the moon… AGAIN

25. Don’t remember what it’s called but the one where we blew up an asteroid to make sure we could do that if one ever is going to destroy the earth

26. James Webb Space Telescope, for me, because of its potential to find life outside of earth by looking at the atmospheres of various exoplanets or studying the dimming of stars suggesting Dyson spheres, and looking deeper than ever into space re-writing what we thought we knew, e.g. that galaxies could form sooner than previously thought by some 200+ million years

    We’re also seeing some deep field details scientists never expected, weird neutron stars that seem to defy expectations, etc

    While the Mars landers are amazing in their own ways, it’s not as crazy looking in our own backyard for microbial life as it is finding something immensely important out there in the cosmos

27. Challenger and Columbia were pretty fire, if I say so myself.

    ^Please ^don’t ^cancel ^me.

28. I’ll always have a soft spot for Cassini-Huygens. I love Saturn, and that mission brought us pictures LANDED ON THE SURFACE of Titan (I feel like people forget we did that), data about subsurface oceans and geysers on Enceladus, some truly wonderful pictures of Saturn itself, information about the ring spokes, the hexagon storm, radar pictures of Titan’s methane oceans, discovering tons of other moons, and more. Plus that work paved the way for Dragonfly which was recently approved for development.

29. The Mars Rover sings Happy Birthday to itself.

30. Welcome Back, Grapp.

    The Grand Tour, Voyager 2.

31. All of the flight test research they did in the 60s. Idk if that counts, but it was cool to see all the wacky aerospace designs

32. I remember waching the first images come in from the Curiosity rover and feeling awestruck. Also, who else but nasa could have developed the “sky crane” landing system?

    https://youtu.be/p1WX0CATyn8?feature=shared