The year 2024 promises to be prolific in space missions. Between ambitious trips to our Moon or the moons of Mars and Jupiter, flying over Venus in search of life, a preview of the exciting year that lies ahead in space.
In the first half of the year, there will be four attempts to land on the Moon – two from the USA, one from Japan and one from China – and each of these missions, if successful, will make history.
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, and the first crew to travel close to the Moon in more than 50 years .
Probes on the Moon
Two private North American companies, Japan’s space agency and China’s want to land on the Moon this year. If any are successful, it will be the first time since the Apollo program ended more than 50 years agothat a spacecraft lands on the Moon.
Peregrine Lunar Module
On January 8th, Astrobotic will launch its Peregrine module, shaped like a box with four “legs”, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. If everything goes according to plan, the spacecraft will land on February 23 in Sinus Viscositatis – Bay of Viscosity – where he will work for eight days.
Equipped with 20 payloads from various government and private entities, this spacecraft will be the first to study an enigmatic spot known as Gruithuisen Domes, the region adjacent to the landing site, mounds that appear to have been created from silica-rich magma. But Scientists can’t explain how they could have formed on the Moon without water and without tectonic plates.
Intuitive Machines module
The second American mission to the Moon, IM-1 da Intuitive Machineswill launch in mid-February, after being delayed due to unfavorable weather conditions predicted for the original January 12-16 launch window.
The mission takes the Nova-C probe to the edge of the Malapert A crater, near the Moon’s south pole.
Your objective is to reach 100 meters from the landing site, the edge of the Shioli impact craterto gather more information about how the Moon formed.
If successful, Japan will be the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the Moon, after the Soviet Union, the USA, Chinait’s yes India.
China on the dark side of the Moon
In May, China plans to send the Chang’e 6 spacecraft to collect rocks from the far side of the Moon.
Although China’s space agency has not revealed the precise location where the probe will land, the landing region is expected to be the Bacia Aitken at the South Pole, a 4 billion-year-old impact basin and the largest well-preserved area on the other side of the Moon. Samples collected in this region are believed to come from the lunar mantle and may contain information about early evolution of the Moon, the Earth and perhaps even the entire Solar System.
Inaugural flight of Ariane 6
The European Space Agency (ESA) wants the 2024 marks Europe’s autonomous return to space with the inaugural flight of the new Ariane 6 rocket.
After several delays, the Ariane 6’s inaugural flight is scheduled between June 15th and July 31st.
With this new rocket, which is now undergoing final tests, it will be possible to reach Earth orbit and deep space, which facilitates European navigation, Earth observation, scientific and security programs.
The return of Vega-C
In autumn, flights from the Vega-Ca medium-sized launcher that has had some problems.
With Vega-C and Ariane 6, Europe wants to guarantee autonomous access to space, new mission possibilities, including return operations to Earth with the ESA Rider space reentry vehicle.
Hera planetary defense mission
With launch scheduled for the end of 2024, the Hera space mission will take a probe to travel to Didymos, a system of two asteroids close to Earth, where it is expected to arrive at the end of 2026.
This first European planetary defense mission is the second part of a project initiated by NASA with the probe DART what, in September 2022, it collided with an asteroid to deflect it.
Dimorphos, a moon in the orbit of one of the asteroids, thus became the first object in the Solar System to have its orbit measurably displaced by human effort.
In collaboration with NASA, Hera will carry out a detailed study of the post-impact impact of the North American probe DART em Dimorphos.
Japan explores Martian moon
For decades, astronomers have been intrigued by the origins of Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos: they could simply be captured asteroids, or they could be fragments of Mars resulting from an asteroid colliding with the planet’s surface long ago.
To find out more, Japan plans to launch a mission to Phobos, the larger of the two moons, in September to collect samples, the mission Martian Moon eXploration (MMX).
The three-module spacecraft will first reach the orbit of the red planet in 2025. It is expected that it will then enter the orbit of Phobos and land a module on the moon for a few hours to collect around 10 grams of material from the surface. MMX will return with the sample and land in 2029 at an Australian military installation called the Woomera Forbidden Zone.
NASA go to Europa
Despite being smaller than our Moon, Jupiter’s moon Europa is believed to have a saltwater ocean beneath its icy surface with twice as much water as Earth’s oceans.
To find out if this small world can harbor life as we know it, NASA plans to launch the Europa Clipper mission in October.
Instead of directly orbiting Europa itself, the probe will enter an orbit around Jupiter in 2030, so as to spend most of its time outside the gas giant’s intense radiation and sporadically pass by Europa for observations of ocean structure and composition. chemical.
Artemis II: another step towards the return of humans to the Moon
The mission is scheduled to launch in November Artemis IIthe second part of the ambitious project to take humans to the Moon more than 52 years later.
This mission will be the first to send astronauts close to the Moon since 1972. During the 10-day trip around the Moon, four astronauts – three from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency – will test the functionality of the Orion spacecraft.
ESA participates in the mission with the service module built in Europe – European Service Module – which provides power and propulsion for the Orion spacecraft and will also provide water and air for astronauts.
SpaceX plans to launch 150 missions this year
A SpaceX by Elon Musk wants to set new spaceflight records this year. In 2023 it launched 96 orbital missions, a jump from the previous year’s record of 61, set a year earlier. This year has another ambitious goal.
“Next year, we want to increase the flight rate to around 12 flights per month, or 144 flights,” disse William Gerstenmaiervice president of SpaceX, on October 18 at a hearing of the US Senate Subcommittee on Space and Science.
Around two-thirds of SpaceX’s launches in 2023 were dedicated to the construction of Starlink, the constellation of satellites for providing internet, a trend that is expected to continue this year as the network is not yet complete.
Starlink currently has 5,230 satellites, SpaceX has permission to place 12,000 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and has already requested authorization to launch another 30,000.
Of SpaceX’s 96 orbital missions last year, 91 were carried out by its Falcon 9 rocket and the powerful Falcon Heavy was responsible for the other five. But 2023 also featured two test flights of the launcher that SpaceX believes will revolutionize spaceflight – the Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.
Starship is SpaceX’s choice to one day go to Mars. In addition to the crew module, it consists of a first floor called Super Heavy. The set will be a total of 120 meters high and will have the capacity to carry 100 tons on board.
NASA also chose this rocket to take astronauts halfway to the Moon under the Artemis program.
The Artemis 3 mission – the one that will actually take people to the Moon – is scheduled for 2025.
Private mission to Venus
Coming to the end of 2024, it is planned the mission of Rocket Lab and MIT Venus, which aims to search for organic material, a possible indicator of life, in the planet’s atmosphere.
The Venus Life Finder spacecraft, equipped with a probe built in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will leave on December 30th to reach Venus a year and a half later. Once there, the probe will launch an instrument into the Venusian clouds that will transmit data to the probe to catalog molecules and determine whether any of them indicate the existence of life.
2024-01-07 07:30:00
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