juliensimon/deep-space-missions-tracker

Deep-Space Missions Tracker

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face.

Dataset description

A daily-updating log of where humanity's active deep-space missions are right now, computed from NASA/JPL's Horizons ephemeris system. Updated daily, growing one row per mission per day.

The dataset tracks a fleet of interplanetary spacecraft -- the Voyagers in interstellar space, New Horizons in the Kuiper Belt, Juno at Jupiter, the asteroid explorers Lucy, Psyche, and OSIRIS-APEX, and the Jupiter-bound Europa Clipper and JUICE. For each spacecraft and each day it records the heliocentric distance (distance from the Sun), the geocentric distance (distance from Earth), the sky position (right ascension and declination), the radial velocities, and the one-way light travel time to Earth.

Together these quantities turn abstract mission status into something tangible: you can watch the Voyagers' light-time stretch past 20 hours, see Lucy's distance swing as it loops out to the Jupiter Trojans, or compare how far each probe has traveled from the Sun. The geometry is authoritative -- Horizons is the same system mission navigators and observatories use -- so the dataset is suitable for plotting trajectories, computing communication delays, planning ground-based observations, and teaching orbital mechanics. The Horizons ephemerides themselves are computed by JPL (a US Government facility); the included mission facts are drawn from public mission documentation.

This dataset is suitable for time-series forecasting tasks.

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Sample	Null %
date	datetime64[ms]	UTC date of the ephemeris snapshot (00:00 UT geometry).	2026-06-23 00:00:00	0.0%
mission	string	Common name of the spacecraft.	Lucy	0.0%
spacecraft_id	Int64	JPL Horizons spacecraft identifier (a negative integer; e.g. -31 for Voyager 1).	-49	0.0%
agency	string	Operating space agency (NASA or ESA).	NASA	0.0%
launch_year	Int64	Calendar year the spacecraft launched.	2021	0.0%
destination	string	Primary mission target or regime.	Jupiter Trojan asteroids	0.0%
ra_deg	float64	Astrometric right ascension of the spacecraft as seen from Earth's center, ICRF frame, in degrees (0-360).	203.35391	0.0%
dec_deg	float64	Astrometric declination as seen from Earth's center, ICRF frame, in degrees (-90 to +90).	-13.43136	0.0%
sun_distance_au	float64	Heliocentric distance: distance from the spacecraft to the Sun, in astronomical units (1 AU = ~149.6 million km).	4.730994445121	0.0%
earth_distance_au	float64	Geocentric distance: distance from the spacecraft to Earth, in astronomical units. Drives signal strength and round-trip light time.	4.20672433072808	0.0%
sun_range_rate_kms	float64	Rate of change of the heliocentric distance, in km/s. Positive means receding from the Sun, negative means approaching.	6.7284971	0.0%
earth_range_rate_kms	float64	Rate of change of the Earth distance, in km/s. Positive means receding from Earth.	31.4276653	0.0%
light_time_min	float64	One-way light travel time from the spacecraft to Earth, in minutes. The signal delay for commands and telemetry.	34.98625942	0.0%

Quick stats

• 54 position records across 9 missions and 6 day(s)
• Most distant today: Voyager 1 at 170.2 AU from Earth
• That signal takes 23.6 hours to reach us

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/deep-space-missions-tracker", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

from datasets import load_dataset
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/deep-space-missions-tracker", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Current distance of each mission from the Sun
latest = df[df["date"] == df["date"].max()].sort_values("sun_distance_au")
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9, 5))
ax.barh(latest["mission"], latest["sun_distance_au"])
ax.set_xlabel("Distance from the Sun (AU)")
ax.set_title("Active Deep-Space Missions: Heliocentric Distance")
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

# Track one mission's Earth distance over time
voyager = df[df["mission"] == "Voyager 1"].sort_values("date")
plt.plot(voyager["date"], voyager["light_time_min"] / 60)
plt.ylabel("One-way light time (hours)")
plt.title("Voyager 1 signal delay")
plt.show()

Data source

https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/

Update schedule

Daily at 16:55 UTC

Related datasets

• juliensimon/deep-space-probes

• juliensimon/space-missions

• juliensimon/parker-solar-probe-encounters

• juliensimon/solar-orbiter-encounters

• juliensimon/spacecraft-database

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a like on Hugging Face. It helps others discover it.

About the author

Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.

Citation

@dataset{deep_space_missions_tracker,
  title = {Deep-Space Missions Tracker},
  author = {juliensimon},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/deep-space-missions-tracker},
  publisher = {Hugging Face}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0