A look at the start of the Artemis project.
The year 2023 has proven to be an important year for space missions: NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission returned a sample from an asteroid and India's Chandrayaan-3 mission explored the lunar south pole. 2024 looks set to be another exciting year for space exploration.
Several new missions as part of NASA's Artemis plan and the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative will target the Moon.
There will be several exciting launches in the second half of the year: the Martian Moons eXploration mission launches in September, Europa Clipper and Hera in October, and Artemis II and VIPER to the Moon in November – if all goes according to plan.
I'm a planetary scientist and here are six of the space missions I'm most excited about in 2024.
1. Europe Clipper
NASA will launch the Europa Clipper, which will explore one of Jupiter's largest moons, Europa. Europa is slightly smaller than Earth's moon and has a surface made of ice. Beneath its icy shell, Europa likely harbors a saltwater ocean that scientists estimate contains more than twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined.
With Europa Clipper, scientists want to find out whether Europa's ocean could provide a suitable habitat for extraterrestrial life.
To this end, the mission plans to fly over Europa nearly 50 times to study the moon's icy shell, its surface geology and its subsurface ocean. The mission will also search for active geysers erupting from Europe.
This mission will be crucial for scientists who want to understand marine worlds like Europa.
The launch window – the period in which the mission can launch and reach the planned route – opens on October 10, 2024 and lasts 21 days. The spacecraft will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and reach the Jupiter system in 2030.
2. Start of Artemis II
The Artemis program, named after Apollo's twin sister in Greek mythology, is NASA's plan to return to the moon. It will send people to the moon for the first time since 1972, including the first woman and the first person of color. Artemis also includes plans for a longer-term sustainable presence in space, which will prepare NASA to send humans even further – to Mars.
Artemis II is the first manned stage of this plan. Four astronauts will be on board during the ten-day mission.
The mission builds on Artemis I, which sent an unscrewed capsule into orbit around the moon in late 2022.
Artemis II will place astronauts into orbit around the moon before returning them home. The launch is currently scheduled for November 2024. However, it is possible that it will be postponed to 2025, depending on whether all the necessary equipment, such as spacesuits and oxygen equipment, is ready.
3. VIPER searches for water on the moon
VIPER, which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, is a golf cart-sized robot that NASA will use to explore the moon's south pole in late 2024.
Originally scheduled for launch in 2023, NASA postponed the mission to conduct further testing of the lander system that Astrobotic, a private company, had developed as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
This robotic mission is designed to search for volatiles, which are molecules that evaporate easily at lunar temperatures, such as water and carbon dioxide. These materials could provide resources for future human exploration on the Moon.
The VIPER robot will rely on batteries, heat pipes and radiators during its 100-day mission as it navigates everything from the extreme heat of the lunar day – when temperatures can reach 224 degrees Fahrenheit (107 degrees Celsius) – to the cold, The moon's shadowy regions can reach an incredible -400 F (-240 C).
Launch and delivery of VIPER to the lunar surface is scheduled for November 2024.
4. Lunar Trailblazer and PRIME-1 missions
NASA recently invested in a class of small, low-cost planetary missions called SIMPLEx, which stands for Small, Innovative Missions for PLAnetary Exploration. These missions help reduce costs by being accompanied by other launches, such as a so-called rideshare or a secondary payload.
An example is the Lunar Trailblazer. Like VIPER, Lunar Trailblazer will search for water on the Moon.
But while VIPER will land on the lunar surface and study a specific area near the south pole in detail, Lunar Trailblazer will orbit the moon, measuring the surface temperature and mapping the location of water molecules across the lunar world.
Currently, Lunar Trailblazer is on track to be operational in early 2024.
However, because it is a secondary payload, Lunar Trailblazer's launch schedule depends on the launch readiness of the primary payload. The PRIME-1 mission, scheduled to launch in mid-2024, is the Lunar Trailblazer mission.
PRIME-1 will drill the Moon – this is a test of the type of drilling VIPER will use. However, the launch date will likely depend on the recency of previous launches.
A previous Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission with the same landing partner has been postponed until February 2024 at the earliest, and further delays could push PRIME-1 and Lunar Trailblazer back.
5. JAXA Mars-Moon Exploration Mission
While Earth's moon is scheduled to welcome many visitors – large and small, robots and crews – in 2024, Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos will soon also receive a visitor. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has a robotic mission called Martian Moon eXploration (MMX) in development, scheduled to launch around September 2024.
The mission's main scientific goal is to determine the origin of Mars' moons. Scientists aren't sure whether Phobos and Deimos are ancient asteroids that Mars trapped in its orbit using its gravity, or whether they formed from debris already orbiting Mars.
The spacecraft will orbit Mars for three years and conduct scientific operations to observe Phobos and Deimos. MMX will also land on the surface of Phobos and collect a sample before returning to Earth.
6. ESA Hera Mission
Hera is a European Space Agency mission to return to the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system, which NASA's DART mission visited in 2022.
But DART not only visited these asteroids, but also collided with one of them to test a planetary defense technique called “kinetic impact.” DART hit Dimorphos with such force that it changed its orbit.
The kinetic impact technique crushes something on an object to change its trajectory. This could prove useful if humanity detects a potentially dangerous object on a collision course with Earth and needs to reroute it.
Hera will launch in October 2024 and travel to Didymos and Dimorphos in late 2026, where it will study the physical properties of asteroids.
This article was originally published on The Conversation website: Click HERE