2024 will be another important year for space exploration, with several new missions in the pipeline
2023 was an important year for space missions including India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission which set out to explore the lunar south pole and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission of returning a sample from an asteroid.
2024 will be another important year for space exploration, with several new missions in the pipeline. Here are some of them.
Europa Clipper will be launched by NASA which will explore one of Jupiter’s largest moons, Europa. The main goal is to determine whether there are places below the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon that could support life.
Artemis II launch is NASA’s plan to send humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972, including the first woman and the first person of colour. It also includes plans for a longer-term, sustained presence in space that will prepare NASA for eventually sending people even farther — to Mars.
The VIPER rover will be used to survey water at the south pole of the Moon. VIPER, which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, is designed to search for volatiles, which could provide resources for future human exploration on the Moon.
JAXA’s Martian Moon eXploration mission is to study Phobos and Deimos, Mars’ moons. The main science objective is to determine their origin and the spacecraft will spend three years around Mars conducting science operations.
Hera is a mission by the European Space Agency to return to the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system that NASA’s DART mission visited in 2022. DART hit Dimorphos using a technique called ‘kinetic impact’ which led to an orbit change and this could prove useful if a potentially hazardous object is ever on a collision course with Earth and there arises a need to redirect it. Hera will be on a mission to study the physical properties of the asteroids.
Lunar Trailblazer will look for water on the moon like VIPER. But it is an example of SIMPLEx (Small, Innovative Missions for PLanetary Exploration) which will save costs by tagging along on other launches as what is called a rideshare, or secondary payload.
The PRIME-1 mission is Lunar Trailblazer’s ride which will drill into the Moon and serve as a test run that VIPER will use.
Apart from several key missions under NASA’s Artemis plan and other international endeavours, 2024 could prove to be a year of pioneering scientific advancement for India as well.
ISRO will be launching missions like Gaganyaan which is an ambitious human spaceflight program, another spacecraft to Mars called Mangalyaan 2 and INSAT 3DS for enhanced meteorological observations.
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