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

Voyager 2

The only spacecraft ever to visit Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager 2 launched in August 1977, two weeks before Voyager 1.

It took a rare path: a lining-up of the outer planets that happens about once every 175 years let it swing from one to the next. It visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

It's still the only spacecraft ever to visit Uranus and Neptune. Almost all our close-up pictures of them come from Voyager 2.

It crossed into interstellar space in 2018. In 2023 a wrong command tilted its antenna slightly, and it went quiet for two weeks until NASA "shouted" a fix across 20 billion km.

If you rode along

Endless dark, with the Sun just a bright star behind you. You'd have come about 20 billion km from home.

The numbers

Launched
20 August 1977
Visited
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989)
Left the Sun's bubble
November 2018