Putting the planets where they are tonight…

Every planet, moon, dwarf planet and spacecraft here is drawn where it really is right now, worked out from NASA JPL orbit data. Run time forwards or backwards with the bar at the bottom.

The Sun and planets

  • Sun
  • Mercury
  • Venus
  • Earth
  • Mars
  • Jupiter
  • Saturn
  • Uranus
  • Neptune

Dwarf planets

  • Ceres
  • Pluto
  • Haumea
  • Makemake
  • Eris

Moons

  • Moon
  • Phobos
  • Deimos
  • Io
  • Europa
  • Ganymede
  • Callisto
  • Mimas
  • Enceladus
  • Tethys
  • Dione
  • Rhea
  • Titan
  • Iapetus
  • Miranda
  • Ariel
  • Umbriel
  • Titania
  • Oberon
  • Triton
  • Charon

Belts

  • Asteroid Belt
  • Kuiper Belt

Spacecraft

  • Voyager 1
  • Voyager 2
  • New Horizons
  • Pioneer 10
  • Pioneer 11

Fall inside

  • Inside the Sun
  • Inside Mercury
  • Inside Venus
  • Inside Earth
  • Inside Mars
  • Inside Jupiter
  • Inside Saturn
  • Inside Uranus
  • Inside Neptune
  • Inside the Moon
  • Inside Europa
  • Inside Titan
Right now · live

New Horizons

The piano-sized probe that showed us Pluto.

New Horizons is about the size of a grand piano. It left Earth in 2006 faster than any spacecraft before it.

When it launched, Pluto was still a planet. Seven months later, it wasn't.

Nine and a half years later, in July 2015, it flew past Pluto and sent home the first close-up pictures of that distant heart.

On New Year's Day 2019 it flew past Arrokoth, the most distant world ever explored up close.

It carries a small amount of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto.

If you rode along

The Kuiper Belt, deep in the cold, with the Sun a brilliant star. A radio message home takes many hours to get there.

The numbers

Launched
19 January 2006
Visited
Jupiter (2007), Pluto (2015) and Arrokoth (2019)