September 1, 1979: Pioneer 11 is first Earth based spacecraft to fly past Saturn.
September 3, 1976:Â The unmanned spacecraft, Viking 2, landed on Mars to take the first close-up color photos of that planet.
September 3, 2006: SMART-1 spacecraft was intentionally crashed into the Moon. It was a Swedish-designed European Space Agency satellite orbited around the Moon. It was launched on September 27, 2003 at 23:14 UTC from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana. “SMART” stands for Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology. On September 3, 2006 (05:42 UTC), SMART-1 was deliberately crashed into the Moon’s surface, ending its mission. Scientists hope that the impact would kick up enough fresh lunar “soil” that they may study its composition.
September 5, 1977: Voyager 1 was launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan IIIE Centaur rocket. The Voyager 1 spacecraft is an 815-kilogram unmanned probe of the outer solar system and beyond and is currently operational. It is the farthest human-made object from Earth. The Voyager 1 spacecraft has moved into the solar system’s final frontier, a vast area where the Sun’s influence gives way to interstellar space. At 14 billion kilometers (95 astronomical units or 8.8 billion miles) from the Sun, signals from Voyager 1 take more than thirteen hours to reach its control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California. By the way, this was this probe that the movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, featured near its conclusion.