Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom, click any body to fly to it — out to Eris, the most massive dwarf planet, on its steeply tilted scattered-disc orbit. Chinese spacecraft are true 3D models: red for spacecraft and landers, gold for relays and navigation payloads.
China is now the only country operating its own space station, the first to land on the Moon's far side, and the first to return samples from it. Its spacecraft are spread across low Earth orbit, geostationary orbit, the Earth–Moon L2 point, the lunar surface and Mars. Tap any mission to fly to it in the 3D model above.
Two decades of Chinese deep-space milestones, in order.
China's first lunar orbiter maps the Moon and intentionally impacts its surface in 2009.
First Chinese soft landing on the Moon — the first soft lunar landing by any nation since 1976.
A relay placed at Earth–Moon L2 makes the first-ever far-side landing, in Von Kármán crater, possible.
1,731 g of lunar samples returned, the BeiDou navigation system completed, and a Mars mission launched — all in one year.
Tianhe, Wentian and Mengtian modules dock in orbit. Zhurong roves Mars from May 2021.
First samples ever returned from the Moon's far side — 1,935 g from Apollo Basin — supported by a new relay.
Targeted at the lunar south pole — Shackleton crater region — to search for water ice, with orbiter, lander, rover and a hopping probe.
China's stated goal: taikonauts on the Moon before 2030, using the Mengzhou spacecraft and Lanyue lander.
Model notes: planet and dwarf-planet orbital distances, eccentricities and inclinations are drawn to true scale (1 AU = 80 scene units) — the inner planets really do huddle this close to the Sun. Planet and Sun sizes, and the orbits of moons and satellites around their planets, are enlarged for legibility — this is an explorer, not an ephemeris. Orbital periods, diameters, launch dates and mission facts are the real published values for each body and spacecraft. Planet, Moon and Sun textures are the Solar System Scope texture pack, built from NASA imagery (CC BY 4.0); rendering is WebGL via Three.js. Operators: CNSA (China National Space Administration), CMSA (China Manned Space Agency) and CASC. An independent educational model; not affiliated with CNSA or NASA. Dwarf-planet and Galilean-moon skins: Pluto uses the New Horizons global mosaic and Ceres the Dawn global mosaic (NASA/USGS); Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto use USGS Voyager–Galileo mosaics — all via NOAA Science On a Sphere. Eris, Haumea and Makemake have never been visited by a spacecraft, so their skins are artist’s impressions based on telescope data. The moons wear mission mosaics too — Cassini for Saturn’s moons, Voyager 2 for Uranus’s moons and Triton, New Horizons for Charon, USGS mosaics for Phobos, Deimos and the Galilean moons (all via NOAA Science On a Sphere); Proteus, Nix, Hydra, Dysnomia, Hi’iaka, Namaka and MK2 have never been mapped, so their skins are artist’s impressions.