- 4304 - SPACE MISSIONS in 2024! Ambitious new missions to the moon, Venus, Jupiter and more are planned for 2024. In the first half of the year, there will be four attempts to land on the moon, two from the U.S. and one each from Japan and China. The second half of the year will feature the debut of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket, another trip to the asteroid Dimorphos, a mission to assess the habitability of Jupiter's icy moon Europa.
------------------------- 4304 - SPACE MISSIONS in 2024!
- For the first time
since the Apollo program ended more than 50 years ago, spacecraft are set to
land on the moon. Two private companies, Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and
Houston-based Intuitive Machines, are each planning to land a spacecraft on the
moon early this year.
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- On January 8,
Astrobotic will launch its box-like, four-legged Peregrine lander from Cape
Canaveral, Florida. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft would touch
down on February 23 in Sinus Viscositatis ( "The Bay of Stickiness")
and operate for eight days.
-
-
Equipped with 20 payloads the spacecraft would be the first to study an enigmatic patch known as Gruithuisen Domes, the region adjacent to its landing site. While the domes appear to have been created from magma rich in silica, scientists cannot explain how these domes would have formed on the moon without water and plate tectonics.
-
- The second U.S.
mission to the moon, Intuitive Machines' IM-1, will now launch in mid-February
after unfavorable weather conditions delayed the original January 12-16 launch
window. The mission would deliver the Nova-C lander to the rim of the Malapert
A crater near the moon's south pole.
-
- On January 20, the
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) plans to touch down its robotic Smart
Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) lander, nicknamed "moon sniper,"
on the near side of the moon.
-
- Its goal is to
arrive within 328 feet of its target landing site, the rim of the Shioli impact
crater, which may reveal more insight into how the moon formed. If successful,
Japan would become only the fifth nation to land a spacecraft on the moon
(after the Soviet Union, the U.S., China and India).
-
- In May, 2024,
China plans to send its Chang'e 6 spacecraft to collect rocks from the moon's
far side. While China's space agency has not revealed the spacecraft's precise
landing site, the touchdown region would be the South Pole-Aitken Basin, a 4
billion-year-old impact basin and the largest well-preserved area on the lunar
far side. Samples collected in this region are thought to be blasted from the
moon's mantle and may hold hints about early evolution of the moon, Earth and
perhaps even the solar system.
-
- The debut launch
of Europe's long-delayed Ariane 6 heavy-lift rocket will occur between June 15
and July 31, European Space Agency officials announced in late November. Europe
currently does not have independent access to space; Ariane 6's predecessor,
Ariane 5, was retired in July 2022, and another smaller rocket, Vega-C, remains
grounded due to technical failures. So Ariane 6's successful first flight would
be momentous for the continent, allowing it to once again independently launch
satellites into orbit.
-
- In September 2022,
the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft tested a planetary
defense method by smashing into the asteroid Dimorphos, located about 6.8
million miles from Earth, shortening its orbit by 32 minutes.
-
- To study the
aftermath of this collision, a European sequel mission, Hera, will launch in
October, with a goal to rendezvous with Dimorphos in late 2026 or early 2027.
The mission is designed to study the crater DART left behind and to document
the physical properties of Dimorphos and its asteroid companion, Didymos.
-
- For decades,
scientists have puzzled over the origins of the two moons of Mars, Phobos and
Deimos. The moons could simply be captured asteroids, or, they may be fragments
of Mars that coalesced into moons after an asteroid struck the planet's surface
long ago.
-
- Japan plans to
launch a sample return mission, Martian Moon eXploration (MMX), in September to study Phobos, the
larger of the two moons. The three-module spacecraft would first arrive in an
orbit around the Red Planet in 2025.
-
- Then, the craft is
expected to move into an orbit around Phobos and land a sample-collection
module on the moon for a few hours to scoop about 0.02 pounds of material from
the surface. The MMX spacecraft will return with the collected sample and land
in 2029 in an Australian military facility called the Woomera Prohibited Zone.
-
- Despite being
smaller than our own moon, Jupiter's moon Europa is thought to host a saltwater
ocean underneath its icy shell, with twice as much water as Earth's oceans. To
learn if the tiny world is hospitable to life as we know it, NASA plans to
launch Europa Clipper in October as the first mission to explore an oceanic
world other than Earth.
-
- Rather than
directly orbit Europa itself, the spacecraft will enter an orbit around Jupiter
in 2030 such that it would spend much of the time out of the gas giant's
intense radiation and intermittently fly by Europa for observations of its
ocean structure and chemical makeup.
-
- To study how and
when Mars lost its atmosphere, NASA is sending two satellites, nicknamed
"Blue" and "Gold" after the school colors of the University
of California, Berkeley, which leads the mission, around the Red Planet in
October.
-
- The satellites are
part of the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE)
mission to study how the Martian atmosphere interacts with solar wind. The satellites would provide simultaneous
data from different orbital positions around Mars beginning in 2026.
-
- NASA's Artemis II
mission, the first to send astronauts near the moon since 1972, could launch as
soon as Nov. 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the 10-day
trip around the moon, four astronauts, three from NASA and one from the
Canadian Space Agency, will test functionality of the Orion spacecraft to
determine readiness of the Artemis program for longer-duration crewed missions
to the lunar surface.
-
- Finishing off 2024
would be Rocket Lab's mission to Venus. The mission is designed to look for
organic material, a possible indicator of life, in the planet's atmosphere. The
Venus Life Finder spacecraft, equipped with a 16-inch probe would fly on
December 30 and reach Venus 1.5 years later.
-
- Once there, the
spacecraft would drop a single-instrument probe into the Venusian clouds. The
probe would catalog molecules for three to five minutes and determine if any
are indicators of life.
-
-
January 1, 2023
SPACE MISSIONS in 2024! 4304
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