The coming year could be pretty dark here on Earth as the economy tries to recover from the pandemic and vaccine distribution gets hook to hook.
But in space, 2021 promises to be a banner year. New sins, landers, robbers, and instruments push deeper into the solar system and beyond, strengthening humanity’s efforts to exploit valuable resources, to prepare for manned missions, and, perhaps most interestingly, to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. .
These are some of the most exciting space stories of 2021.
THE MOON
It seems like everyone wants to go to the moon these days. There is a lot of important science that we can do on the dusty sphere and valuable things that we can build in the weak gravity of the moon using the satellite’s own resources. The moon is also a possible starting point for follow-up missions to Mars.
Under Donald Trump, NASA’s Artemis mission was aimed at placing astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. It was never a realistic goal, and President-elect Joe Biden is likely to delay the mission by a few years. China is hot on America’s heels with its own manned mission that could reach the moon in the 2030s. Experts expect Russia to launch its own lunar landing effort in 2021.
Meanwhile, more and more robots are moonbound. Thanks to the fast-growing private space industry, lunar probes are so small and cheap that it’s hard to keep up with everyone. Nowadays, a refrigerator-sized lander is sold for several hundred million dollars, including launch.
During the 2021 lunar missions, Pittsburgh space company Astrobotic plans to launch one of its landings in Peregrine in July. The spacecraft is on its way to a large lunar crater called Lacus Mortis, where it will deliver as many as 28 NASA instruments. The payloads contain devices that will test new lunar navigation and landing technology–key systems for future lunar transmissions. A few months later in October, Intuitive Machines in Houston plans to launch one of its Nova-C landers, carrying five NASA instruments, after a dark dark moon named Oceanus Procellarum. The mission is a kind of dress rehearsal for a later manned mission that could hit a similar spot.
For moon viewers, November should be big. This is when NASA plans to develop the first test launch of its rocket and the Orion capsule of the Space Launch System, which has been developed for decades, the key vehicles for America’s ultimate manned mission to the Moon.
The US space agency is using the unmanned test mission to transport a number of “cubesats” to the moon. The idea is that the Lunar Flashlight, Lunar Icecube and LunaH cubesats should scan and map the moon’s dark south pole in hopes of determining deposits of ice that can process future explorers into fuel.
“The success of the rocket and those missions will be a big leap and a very long one,” Matt Siegler, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, told The Daily Beast.
MARCH
Years of work by three countries come to the red planet at the point of only a few days in early 2021. This is when ‘Mars becomes competitive’, astronomer Chris Impey of the University of Arizona told The Daily Beast.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is expected to land in mid-February, embarking on a decade-long sampling effort, part of a larger effort to find solid evidence of microbial life on Mars. (Although to be honest, at least one scientist believes us already evidence of life found on the planet.)
Not to be outdone, the Chinese space agency has its own Mars probe, Tianwen-1. It should reach the red planet only a few days after endurance. Tianwen-1 is a combination orbiter-lander rover, which Siegler describes as ‘cool’. The orbit scans potential landing sites before dropping the lander, which in turn uses the crossbar.
“It’s also a big political statement,” Siegler added. “China is on the right track to lead true space exploration, and it will be a big decision for the US how or whether they will keep up.”
The United Arab Emirates’ first Mars mission also arrives across the red planet in February. The Hope orbit contains sensors to analyze Mars’ atmosphere and climate. The Mars exploration is “a great achievement for a new space nation,” Siegler said.
All this competition on Mars, which feeds every mission a growing amount of research, pushes us closer to what many scientists consider an inevitable and profound conclusion.–that life has evolved on other planets.
The Perseverance Rover is at the heart of this possible historic moment. “The big story for early 2021 will not be that the rover found provocative evidence for extraterrestrial biology. We expect that to happen,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California. told The Daily Beast. ‘The big story would be a failure to find any promising sites. ”
SPACE TELESCOPE
Since 1990, astronomers have relied on one million-billion-dollar instrument for many of their major observations of other planets. The Hubble Space Telescope.
But Hubble is old, outdated, and honestly falling apart. NASA had to send astronauts to the 44-meter-long telescope to do five different repairs over the years.
In 1996, NASA, in collaboration with Northrop Grumman and Bell Aerospace, began developing the new James Webb Space Telescope to replace Hubble. Ten billion dollars, multiple design hiccups and a few delays later, the 66-foot-long telescope is finally ready.
The mission is expected to explode in October 14 years later than NASA originally hoped.
The main mission of the James Webb Space Telescope is to investigate distant galaxies for clues about the origin of the universe. But there are also seductive possibilities closer to home. ‘The great discovery of Webb may be to find a relatively nearby exoplanet–say, less than a few dozen light years away–with oxygen or methane in its atmosphere, ”Shostak explained.
“This is strong evidence that the talent of our solar system to cook up life is not very remarkable, and that biology is certainly a cosmic infection, rather than a rare and semi-miraculous event.”
With likely significant developments on the moon and Mars and the planned launch of the new space telescope, the coming year could be a big one for humanity, as it slowly expands into the cosmos … and seeks proof that it is not alone is not.
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