Goals: Astrophysics missions focus on discovering the origin, structure, evolution and destiny of the Universe, and searching for Earthlike planets orbiting distant stars.
Accomplishments: Focused on the farthest reaches of space, astrophysics missions have exponentially increased our understanding of the Universe in only a few decades. Orbiting spacecraft have found hundreds of planets orbiting distant stars -- zeroing in on increasingly smaller targets. They pinpointed the age of our Universe (13.73 billion years) and logged the births and deaths of distant stars. Missions, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, also have produced some of the most iconic imagery of the space age.
Get the latest astrophysics news: NASA News Topics: Universe
Prospects for finding new worlds around other stars brightened in the 1980s when scientists made infrared observations of a disk of dust surrounding the normal star Beta Pictoris (right).