A CodeSights flagship for the spaceflight and history crowd: 213 robotic Solar System probes with their target, operator, country, launch year, mission type and outcome, from the list of Solar System probes (organized by destination), each carrying a Wikidata QID. The famous finding is the curse of the inner planets: group by target and Mars (60 percent success) and Venus (58 percent) are the two hardest destinations, far below the near-perfect records of solar, asteroid and outer-planet missions, with the Sun probes succeeding 95 percent of the time, because orbiting or landing on a planet is far harder than flying past one. The early Soviet Mars and Venus programs failed again and again before the breakthroughs. A second story is the space race: the United States (74 probes) and the Soviet Union (49) account for most of the fleet, with Europe, Japan, China and India filling the modern era. Mission type spans flyby, orbiter, lander, rover and sample return, and outcomes run success, failure and still en route, as with Voyager 1 and its siblings. Lunar missions are catalogued separately and out of scope. Nine acceptance tests.
213 rows in one CSV file, with 9 columns in total: Probe, Probe_ID, Target, Operator, Country, Launch_Year, Mission_Type, Outcome, Probe_URL.
It is built by programmatically scraping en.wikipedia.org, last pulled on 2026-10-17. Datasets are versioned; older versions stay downloadable.
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