NASA Space-Science Missions To Watch

The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (Capstone) is a 25-kg (55-lb.) cubesat designed to enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit around Earth to closely match the Moon’s orbit. Scheduled for launch by Rocket Lab Electron in January, Capstone is expected to demonstrate spacecraft-to-spacecraft navigation and verify the orbit’s feasibility for the Gateway lunar-orbiting outpost.

Launched in July 2020, the Mars 2020 mission is scheduled to land on Feb. 18 in Jezero Crater on the western edge of the Isidis Planitia impact basin. The mission comprises the Perseverance rover and Mars Helicopter technology demonstration. The rover is planned to operate for a Martian year, seeking signs of possible past microbial life, collecting and caching samples for future missions, and producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. China’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter, lander and rover mission also is scheduled to arrive at the planet in February as is the United Arab Emirates’ Mars orbiter Hope.

The international, multimission Mars Sample-Return effort is planned to enter formulation in 2021. The plan calls for the Mars rover Perseverance to cache rock and regolith samples in tubes and leave them on the surface. A European Space Agency (ESA)-provided “fetch” rover will collect and deliver them to NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle. This will launch them into orbit to rendezvous with ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter, which is expected back in the 2030s.

Launched in August 2018, the Parker Solar Probe is scheduled to make its fourth of seven planned flybys of Venus in February as it trims its heliocentric orbit to allow close solar approaches in 2024 and 2025. Passing as close as 6.16 million km (3.85 million mi.) from the Sun’s surface, the spacecraft will trace the flow of energy that heats and accelerates the solar corona and determine the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the source of the solar wind.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is designed to determine whether kinetic impact can be used to divert any future asteroid on a trajectory to impact Earth. Scheduled for launch by SpaceX Falcon 9 in July, the spacecraft will evaluate the technique in 2022 by striking a small asteroid at high velocity and observing the change in orbit. Along with ESA’s Hera mission in 2024, DART makes up the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment collaboration.

The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) is scheduled for launch into a 540-km (337.5-mi.) circular Earth orbit by SpaceX Falcon 9 on Oct. 21. With an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity over the Orbiting Solar Observatory series, IXPE’s two-year mission is to exploit the polarization state of light from astrophysical sources to study targets such as active galactic nuclei, microquasars, pulsars, magnetars, supernova remnants and the Galactic Center.

The $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-m (21.3-ft.) primary mirror, is targeted for launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on Oct. 31. An international program—including NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency—the JWST will complement the Hubble Space Telescope with longer wavelength coverage and improved sensitivity, enabling the telescope to look closer to the beginning of time.

The 12-year Lucy mission is designed to make flyby observations of eight asteroids—one in the main belt and seven Trojan asteroids orbiting in clusters ahead of and behind Jupiter. Scheduled for launch in October, Lucy will make Earth flybys in 2022 and 2024 to reach its main-belt asteroid target in 2025, to be followed by Trojan encounters in 2027-28. Another Earth flyby in 2030 is expected to position the spacecraft for its final flyby in 2033.

A series of lunar-orbiting cubesat missions will ride along on the Artemis 1 debut launch of the Space Launch System and Orion crew spacecraft, scheduled for November. The Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH-Map) will determine the amount of water ice in permanently shadowed lunar polar craters. Lunar Flashlight (pictured) is to search for water in the shadowed polar regions. And the mission for the Lunar Ice Cube is to study the distribution of water and organic volatiles on the Moon.

Also ride-sharing on the Artemis 1 launch, the two-year Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout) mission will use a 14-kg (30.8-lb.) cubesat to deploy an 86-m² (925-ft.²) solar sail to fly by and return images of asteroid 1991 VG. The mission will aim to make at least one slow, close flyby to observe the asteroid’s position in space as well as its shape, spectral class, rotation, local dust and debris field and other properties.