Several notable space missions took place this year. With Chandrayaan-3, India made history by landing near the Moon’s south pole for the first time, while NASA retrieved a sample from a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid. We believe that 2024 will be a watershed point in space exploration. Several missions will focus on the Moon, including some funded by NASA, with others aiming for Jupiter and Mars. Let us have a look.
NISAR is a collaborative mission planned by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and NASA. It is billed as the world’s most costly imaging satellite, with an estimated cost of $1.5 billion. NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) can almost completely cover the Earth at least once every 12 days, providing detailed information on the “dynamics of forests, wetlands, and agricultural lands.” In early 2024, the mission will be launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) aboard ISRO’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark-2 rocket.
A couple of lunar missions will be launched next year
A couple of lunar missions will be launched next year. With the SLIM mission, Japan might conduct the first soft landing on the Moon on January 20. SLIM intends to achieve an “unprecedentedly high precision landing.” It’s meant to land within 100 meters of its intended landing site, a tiny crater called Shioli in the lunar equatorial area. If successful, Japan will be the fifth country to land on the Moon, following the United States, China, Russia, and India.
On January 8, Astrobotics and United Launch Alliance (ULA) plan to launch the “first commercial robotic launch” to the Moon’s surface. This is a collaboration between NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) effort and the Artemis program. Astrobotic, located in Pittsburgh, intends to land the approximately 6.5-foot-tall Peregrine lunar lander on the Moon’s surface on February 23. Twenty commercial and government payloads will be carried by the lander. The planned launch will also be the debut of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. Following that comes NASA’s Artemis 2, the first crewed trip to the Moon in more than 50 years, since the Apollo program ended in 1972. Artemis 2 will ferry four people around the Moon for ten days before returning to Earth. The mission will not be able to land on the Moon.
The launch is currently scheduled for November 2024, although it could be postponed until 2025 if critical equipment, such as spacesuits and oxygen equipment, is not ready. SIMPLEx, NASA’s modest, low-cost planetary mission, was recently launched. These missions intend to save money by launching with other missions as a rideshare payload. VIPER is one example of this initiative, which will search the Moon’s south pole for water and other volatile chemicals. Concurrently, the Lunar Trailblazer will orbit the Moon and map the locations of water molecules on its surface. Both missions aim to provide resources for future human lunar exploration. VIPER will be available in November 2024.
NASA dispatched its DART mission to the same asteroid, Dimorphos, to test a planetary protection mechanism
Scientists hope to investigate our neighboring planet Mars as well. The Martian Moon eXploration (MMX) mission of JAXA will investigate the genesis of Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos. Before returning to Earth, the spacecraft will spend three years surveying the moons and will also land on Phobos’ surface. It will go on sale in September 2024. ISRO is also developing Mangalyaan-2, their second trip to Mars. If everything goes well, it might be available next year. NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will investigate Europa, one of Jupiter’s largest moons. This Jovian moon is considered to have a vast saltwater ocean beneath its icy surface, capable of holding more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
Researchers want to know if the seas around Europa may support extraterrestrial life. The spacecraft will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2024 and will arrive in the Jupiter system in 2030. In addition, the European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing for Hera, a planetary defence mission that will investigate the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system. Previously, NASA dispatched its DART mission to the same asteroid, Dimorphos, to test a planetary protection mechanism. The DART spacecraft collided with Dimorphos in that test, successfully altering the asteroid’s orbit. Hera is intended to assess the success of the DART mission in “great detail.” The launch date is set for October 2024.
