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Over the years, NASA
and other space agencies
have targeted asteroids and comets
in their spacecraft missions.
Some missions were designed specifically to learn more about
physical characteristics of
asteroids and comets while others
were able to view asteroids on their way
to other planetary destinations
(such as JPL's Galileo mission).
The following table shows specific asteroids and comets which
have been, or will be, the targets of selected spacecraft missions.
Each row represents an "encounter" event.
Data are sorted by event-date.
Past missions are shown with a dark-gray background,
past events of current missions are shown with a blue background,
future events are highlighted in green,
and events of missions yet to be launched are shown in dark green.
The table above is arranged in
reverse chronological order of event.
Each row represents a single event for a given target
asteroid or comet.
Some targets have multiple events and thus have multiple entries in the table
(e.g. 25143 Itokawa, with arrival, departure, and sample-return).
The target small-bodies are hyperlinked to their small-body browser page
and mission names are hyperlinked to their mission web-page (where available).
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