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---------------------------- 2224 - The year 2018 Space explorations
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- NASA's newest Red Planet spacecraft. “Insight” made a safe touchdown on the planet Mars on Nov. 26, ushering in a new era of Martian science. As a stationary lander InSight will listen for marsquakes and volcanic activity, track the wobble of the Red Planet's axis and probe the structure of the Red Planet's interior.
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- Parker Solar Probe visits the sun. NASA's latest sun mission will allow a spacecraft to fly through the ultrahot corona for the first time. The Parker Solar Probe lifted off successfully on Aug. 12 on a journey that will see it dip multiple times into the sun's outer atmosphere, giving unprecedented insights into the sun's composition and inner mechanics.
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- One of our star's key mysteries is why the corona is so hot. Temperatures there range between 1.8 million and 5.4 million degrees Fahrenheit. Compare that with the surface of the sun, a far cooler 10,000 degrees F. Scientists suspect that the sun's convection and magnetic fields contribute to the corona's high temperature, but they need observations to back up the theory. The specially shielded Parker will help them come up with the answers.
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- TESS launches in search of exoplanets. NASA's quest to find another Earth got a big boost on April 18, when the planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) made a flawless launch on its way to space. Unlike past satellites, TESS is designed to look for planets near stars in our own neighborhood. Finding planets close to Earth allows other telescopes to quickly zero in on these worlds to learn more about their atmospheric composition. TESS will also act as a pathfinder observatory for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is set to launch in 2021 on a science mission that will include exoplanet studies.
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- TESS was placed on a unique, highly elliptical, 13.7-day orbit that sees it zoom relatively close to Earth within 67,000 miles to send data home before flying out again to 232,000 miles to perform science observations. TESS will scan the entire sky during its two-year mission.
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- China mission to the moon's far side. China landed a robotic lunar rover mission in 2013. This year they are trying to accomplish another moon milestone, landing on the far side. The spacecraft flew from our planet on Dec. 7 on a quest to land a rover and a stationary lander in early January. Its expected destination is the Von Kármán Crater, which is 115 miles wide.
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- The moon's far side is not visible from Earth and, in fact, was not even imaged until the first Soviet satellites orbited the moon in the 1960s. Landing there presents another challenge because there is no way to communicate information back to Earth without a relay satellite. So China sent a Moon satellite in May, which is poised at a gravitationally stable spot in space called the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 2. That will become the communication relay station.
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- Goodbye, Kepler and Dawn. NASA announced on Oct. 30 that its venerable planet-hunting telescope, Kepler, had run out of fuel. It’s mission yielded 70 percent of the 3,800 confirmed alien worlds to date. Kepler spent its first four years in space from 2009 to 2013 gazing at a single patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation, an investigation that yielded 2,327 confirmed exoplanet discoveries to date.
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- After the second of its four pointing devices failed, NASA came up with an innovative way to keep Kepler going; the craft would use the pressure of the sun to stay steady in space, and would study different sectors of the sky over time. This new K2 mission lasted four years and not only yielded exoplanets, but studies of comets, asteroids, supernovas and other phenomena.
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- NASA announced the end of another long-running mission, Dawn, just two days after delivering the Kepler news. Dawn also ran out of fuel. The probe was the first to explore a protoplanet Vesta and a dwarf planet Ceres.
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- Dawn launched in September 2007 and arrived at Vesta in July 2011. There, it remained for 14 months to scrutinize the asteroid's surface; among its many discoveries was finding that liquid water from meteorite impacts once flowed on the surface.
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- Dawn's second and final destination was Ceres, where the probe found a bunch of bright spots that were salts left behind after briny water underground came through Ceres' surface and boiled off into space. Dawn is expected to remain in orbit around Ceres for at least 20 years, but could stay aloft for many decades beyond that.
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- Japan's Hayabusa2 arrives at Ryugu After a more than three-year journey through space, the Japanese spacecraft arrived at asteroid Ryugu on June 27. The aim is to return a sample of the asteroid back to Earth, just as the original Hayabusa spacecraft did nearly a decade ago. But first, Hayabusa2 dropped onto Ryugu two rovers and a lander, which sent back pictures of a bizarre surface.
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- The German-made MASCOT lander deployed on Oct. 3 and fell 6 minutes to the surface before touching down around the asteroid's southern atmosphere. The little lander survived longer than expected on battery power for some 17 hours, allowing a comprehensive set of pictures to be sent back to Earth.
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- In late September, Hayabusa2 deployed two tiny, solar-powered asteroid hoppers. The two bouncers and the lander together are expected to yield much information about Ryugu's history and composition. Hayabusa2 still has another hopper on board that should be deployed sometime next year.
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- NASA arrives at asteroid Bennu The cleverly named OSIRIS-REx ("Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer") arrived at its asteroid destination on December, 3. The 1,640-foot-wide space rock is named Bennu. The Explorer will pick up a sample for shipment back to Earth. Scientists are taking their time to get to know the asteroid and its neighborhood before picking a spot to land
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- Voyager 2 reaches interstellar space. One of NASA's most famous spacecraft reached a cosmic milestone around Nov. 5, when Voyager 2 passed the boundary into interstellar space. This is the point where the influence of the sun gives way to that of the other stars. It is not NASA's first spacecraft to do so; the probe's twin, Voyager 1, made it to interstellar space in 2012.
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- Voyager 2 now provides another data point about the transition zone between the heliopause, the sun's neighborhood, and interstellar space. The arrival was just the latest milestone for the long-running spacecraft launched in 1977 . It is the only NASA spacecraft to pass by the four big outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft's plutonium supply will begin to run low in a few years, forcing it to turn off instruments until it falls silent forever around 2025.
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- BepiColombo launches to Mercury. Mercury has a few years to get ready for its next extended close-up after the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission blasted off on Oct. 19. The spacecraft will cruise for seven years around the solar system, picking up speed from planetary flybys, before going into Mercury orbit in 2025. The only mission that has orbited Mercury so far is NASA's MESSENGER, so BepiColombo will provide a rare up-close look at the solar system's innermost planet.
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- To be sure, the next seven years will still be busy for scientists, who have plenty of work as BepiColombo cruises through the inner solar system. For example, BepiColombo will perform precise measurements of Earth's and Mercury's orbits to look for where the theory of general relativity may fall short. Additionally, the two BepiColombo spacecraft will make multiple flybys, six of Mercury, two of Venus and one of Earth.
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- Stay tuned there is much more to learn
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- January 2, 2019
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--------------------- Thursday, January 3, 2019 -------------------------
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