Every human-made object on the Moon and Mars, from the first Soviet probe to hit the Moon in 1959 to the private landers of the 2020s: 133 things on the Moon and 27 on Mars. Where they are, who left them, how heavy they are, and which few still work.
On 13 September 1959 a Soviet probe called Luna 2 slammed into the Moon at high speed, and a 9,100 kg rocket stage followed it down. They were the first human-made things to reach another world. Since then we have scattered a surprising amount of hardware across the Moon and Mars: robot landers and rovers, probes that crashed on purpose and others that crashed by accident, the empty rocket stages of the Apollo missions, and the small, strange souvenirs left by the twelve men who walked on the Moon, from flags and golf balls to a Bible and a tiny aluminium statue.
Wikipedia keeps a list of all of it. I turned those lists, and the articles around them, into one table of 133 objects on the Moon and 27 on Mars, and put them on maps of both worlds. Switch between them below, drag the slider to watch the junk pile up, and click anything to see what it is.
Symbols: what each object is; colour: the country or agency that left it. Objects that share a spot are spread on a small ring so each can be clicked. Small Apollo items (flags, plaques, the golf balls and so on) are not in Wikipedia's tables: I placed each at its landing site's coordinates, so their positions are the site, not the exact spot. 17 Moon objects have no known position and appear only in the lists. Web maps cannot show the poles, so objects beyond 85 degrees are drawn at the map's edge; the chart in section 06 shows the south pole properly. Data: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Base maps: OpenPlanetaryMap basemaps (OpenPlanetary), from NASA and USGS data.
Adding up the masses in Wikipedia's tables, counting each figure once, gives 203,228 kg on the Moon. That is about 20 times the 10,380 kg on Mars, which is much harder to reach. The United States left 58% of the lunar total and the Soviet Union and Russia 31%. China, a latecomer, has already left 15.1 tonnes. The Apollo missions alone account for 49%, and most of that is five objects: the third stages of the Saturn V rockets from Apollo 13 to 17, each about 14 tonnes, which were deliberately crashed into the Moon for seismic research. Together they weigh 69.5 tonnes, 34% of everything on the Moon.
Who left the most mass
Tonnes, by country or agency. Kilograms as Wikipedia lists them, each shared or repeated figure counted once. The two worlds use different scales. Hover a bar.
The totals are rough. Some masses in the table are launch masses, with fuel that was burned on the way; two are upper or lower bounds; and the article itself gives two other totals, "over 187,400 kilograms" in its introduction and 222,729 kg at the foot of its table. Mars is better documented and lighter: the American share there is 50%, and the heaviest single object is China's Tianwen-1 lander at 1,285 kg.
The heaviest things on another world
The fifteen heaviest objects, all on the Moon. Click a row to find it on the map.
The Moon's junk arrived in two waves. In the 1960s the United States and the Soviet Union raced to get there: 34 objects in Wikipedia's table arrived that decade, and 28 more in the 1970s, with the Apollo landings, the Soviet sample return probes and the Lunokhod rovers. Then nothing at all: no object in the list reached the Moon between 1977 and 1989. The second wave is happening now. With the decade not yet over, the 2020s have already brought 20, more than the 2000s (7) and 2010s (9) put together.
Objects arriving per decade
Every object with a year, by what it is. Moon on the left of each pair, Mars on the right. Year as listed: for a few spacecraft that orbited before crashing it is the launch year. Hover a bar.
The new wave is more crowded and more varied. Objects from 7 countries have reached the Moon since 2020: China's Chang'e 5 and 6, which brought samples home, the second from the far side; India's Chandrayaan-3, which landed near the south pole in 2023; Japan's precision lander SLIM; and a run of private landers. Of the 9 objects in the table built or flown by companies, from SpaceIL's Beresheet in 2019 to a SpaceX rocket stage that hit the Moon in 2026, only 3 landed softly: Intuitive Machines' IM-1 and IM-2 and Firefly's Blue Ghost.
Everything that reached the Moon since 2020
From Wikipedia's table. Click a row to find it on the map.
Landing softly on another world is still difficult. Wikipedia's list of landings records 40 attempts at a soft landing on the Moon, of which 28 worked (70%). The first was Luna 9 on 3 February 1966. China is four for four; the Soviet Union and Russia 8 for 14, including Luna 25 in 2023; and of the 6 commercial attempts, 3 succeeded. Mars is harder still: 11 of 16 attempts worked (69%). The United States landed 9 of its 10; the Soviet Union's Mars 3 touched down in 1971 but fell silent within two minutes; Europe's Beagle 2 and Schiaparelli both failed; and China's Tianwen-1 put the Zhurong rover down at the first try in 2021.
Soft landing attempts that worked, by country
Solid: landed and sent data back. Pale: attempts that crashed or fell silent. Deliberate impacts are not counted as attempts, and nor are landers lost before they arrived. Hover a bar.
Of the 104 objects in the Moon table, 36 landed softly and 68 hit the surface hard, by accident or on purpose. Only three are marked as still operating, all Chinese: the Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4 landers and the Yutu-2 rover. (The article's introduction also counts Japan's SLIM.) But a handful of simpler objects are still in daily use: mirrors called retroreflectors, left by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 and carried by the Soviet Lunokhod 1 and 2 rovers and India's Chandrayaan-3 lander, still bounce laser pulses back to Earth so that scientists can measure the distance to the Moon. On Mars 16 of 20 objects arrived intact, and two are still at work: NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.
What happened to them
Every row of Wikipedia's two tables, by its status. Hover a block.
The Moon always keeps the same face towards Earth, so the far side is hidden from us, and the Moon itself blocks radio contact with anything that lands there. Of the 87 objects in the table with a known position, 15 (17%) are on the far side, more than 90 degrees east or west. Most of them crashed: Ranger 4 by accident in 1962, three Lunar Orbiters at the end of their missions. Only China has landed there: Chang'e 4 and its rover in 2019, talking to Earth through a relay satellite called Queqiao, and Chang'e 6, which brought back the first samples from the far side in 2024. The newest frontier is the south pole, where permanently shadowed craters may hold ice.
Around the Moon's south pole
Objects south of 55 degrees, seen from above the pole. Rings every 10 degrees of latitude. Hover a symbol.
Wikipedia's table leaves out the small things the Apollo crews left behind, but its articles name many of them. I added 29 of them by hand. All six crews planted an American flag; pictures from orbit show that five are still standing, while Apollo 11's was blown over by the engine as the crew took off. Each Lunar Module has a commemorative plaque on its ladder. Alan Shepard hit golf balls on Apollo 14. David Scott of Apollo 15 left a Bible, and a 8.9 cm aluminium figure called the Fallen Astronaut beside a plaque bearing the names of 14 American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts who had died. And a small vial of the ashes of the lunar scientist Eugene Shoemaker rode Lunar Prospector into a polar crater in 1999: the only human remains on the Moon.
Mars has its own leftovers, which the article mentions without listing: heat shields and parachutes, the counterweights Curiosity threw off as it came in to land, a metal cover ejected by Viking 2, Soviet pennants on the Mars 2 and 3 landers, and a depot of sealed rock samples that Perseverance laid down in 2022 for a future mission to collect.
Everything on the Moon
Follows the world chosen on the map. Click a row to find it.
Data. Everything comes from English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). The core is the table in "List of artificial objects on the Moon" (104 rows) and the one in "List of artificial objects on Mars" (20 rows), each with a country or agency, year, mass, status and position. I parsed them cell by cell, expanding merged cells, removing footnote markers and converting longitudes given from 0 to 360 degrees, or as west longitudes, to the usual -180 to 180. Where a mass is shared between two rows, or repeated for a rover (Yutu and Yutu-2 carry their landers' figures), I count it once. Objects without coordinates keep none; I do not guess.
Additions and checks. The small items come from the text of the two lists and of the articles on the Moon landings, the Fallen Astronaut, the Apollo science packages and the Lunar Roving Vehicle; each has a sentence in its source that names it, and each is placed at its landing site. Landing dates and the success rates come from "List of landings on extraterrestrial bodies". That list and the object tables disagree by more than a degree on the position of 8 of the 86 objects they share, including Luna 5, IM-1 and Mars Polar Lander; I keep the object tables' positions and note the other in the data. Some objects that people often mention, such as the falcon feather from Apollo 15 or Charlie Duke's family photograph, are not named in these articles, so they are not here.
Types and status. "What it is" is my classification from each row's name: rocket stages and Lunar Module ascent stages; rovers (and Mars's Ingenuity helicopter); landers that arrived intact; and impacts or crashes, which include orbiters that ended their missions by hitting the surface. Rows such as "Luna 17 and Lunokhod 1" hold a lander and a rover together; I keep them as one object, as the table does. Status follows the colour each table gives its rows.