Planck's objective is to analyze, with the highest accuracy ever achieved, the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang, which we observe today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The US Planck Data Center is located at IPAC, and IPAC generated the Early Release Compact Source Catalog (ERCSC), the first public data product from the mission.

Herschel Space Observatory is the European Space Agency's fourth "Cornerstone Mission". NASA is a partner in the Herschel mission, and the NASA Herschel Science Center is located at IPAC.

Proposed for launch in 2017 as part of NASA's Explorers Program, FINESSE would take the first "family portrait" of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. FINESSE is the first mission dedicated to finding out what exoplanet atmospheres are made of, what conditions or processes are responsible for their composition, and how our own solar system fits into the larger family of planets.

The Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) is a new mission proposal designed to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids that are near the Earth. NEOCam consists of an infrared telescope and a wide-field camera operating at thermal infrared wavelengths. The NEOCam proposal has recently been funded by NASA for technology development.