To the Moon and Beyond: What 2022 Holds for Space Travel | Space

TThis year promises to be an important one for space exploration, with several major programs hitting the launch pad over the next 12 months. The United States will return to the moon and undertake a series of missions aimed at establishing a lunar colony there in a few years. China is expected to complete its Tiangong space station, while Europe and Russia will attempt to land spacecraft on Mars, having failed in all previous attempts. India, South Korea and Japan are also scheduled to send various missions into space.

Rockets

A particular interest will be focused on the powerful new space launch system (SLS). This is the most powerful rocket ever designed and has been built to take astronauts to the moon and beyond as part of the agency’s program. Sagebrush deep space exploration program. With these missions, NASA intends to reopen the solar system for investigation by humans, rather than robotic probes, and regularly bring astronauts to the lunar surface.

The program’s first launch is scheduled for February, when an SLS rocket, more than 300 feet tall, will carry an unmanned Orion capsule on a trajectory that will enter a highly elliptical orbit around the moon. At its closest, the spacecraft will travel 62 miles from the lunar surface before rising 40,000 miles above it, a distance that will take it further from Earth than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown. .

Crucially, Orion, designed to carry four to six astronauts when fully operational, will be equipped with a European service module that will provide the power and propulsion for the capsule to maneuver in orbit. This will give its manufacturer, the European Space Agency, the opportunity to become a key partner in future Artemis missions. If the February mission is successful, a crewed trip around the moon will take place in 2024 and this will be followed by a lunar landing in 2025, a gap of 53 years since Apollo 17, the last manned lunar mission, landed on the Taurus-Littrow. valley in December 1972.

This time, the crew will include at least one woman and the mission will mark the beginning of a program aimed at establishing a lunar colony where astronauts would work months-long missions and develop technologies that could be used by future colonies on Mars. A primary target for the first lunar outpost is Shackleton Crater, near the moon’s south pole, which is believed to contain ice deposits. Not only will water provide valuable sustenance for astronauts, it can be exploited as a source of hydrogen and oxygen, through electrolysis, which can be combined as rocket fuel.

Moon

As part of its preparations to establish a lunar colony, NASA will also launch a massive robot mission program through the agency’s $ 2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. This will involve sending a flotilla of robotic spacecraft to the moon, with the first missions starting this year. Built by private companies with the backing of NASA, these probes will attempt to map underground water reservoirs, study the deep interior of the moon, and unleash rover robots to investigate the lunar surface. The fledgling space company Astrobotic will send its newly designed Peregrine lander to Lacus Mortis, “the lake of death,” a basalt rock plain on the northeast part of the moon. It will carry 11 different instrument payloads and will be followed by another American company, Intuitive Machines, which will send a spacecraft with six payloads to Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms.

Another 12 CLPS missions are scheduled for the next three years, although NASA science director Thomas Zurbuchen warned that these privately funded efforts face a high risk of failure. Up to half could go wrong, he said recently.

Just in case, Russia and India plan to launch their own lunar landers next year, while South Korea is scheduled to place a satellite in lunar orbit to study its mineral composition.

Mars

The search for extraterrestrial life will go a step further this year with the launch of the joint European-Russian project ExoMars Mission, which will land a rover robot on Oxia Planum, a 125-mile-wide clay plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere. The rover, named after Rosalind Franklin, the British chemist and DNA pioneer, will be equipped with a drill capable of probing several feet below the Martian surface, where primitive life forms or at least remnants are expected to survive. of extinct organisms. The 660-pound rover was built by Airbus Defense and Space, at the company’s UK facility in Stevenage. Launch is scheduled for September 22, and landing is expected on June 10, 2023.

However, hopes for the mission’s success are guarded, as neither Russia nor Europe have had any luck landing on Mars. Nineteen Russian and Soviet missions and two European offers to land on the red planet have failed, including Europe’s Schiaparelli lander, which was intended to be a test for the current ExoMars mission, but which crashed on the planet in 2016.

Asteroids

Easily the most spectacular mission to the asteroids will be NASA’s bid to test an anti-asteroid defense system for Earth. Launched last year, the double asteroid redirection test (Dart) spacecraft will crash into the moon Dimorphos in September. Launching toward its target at 15,000 mph, the 1,340-pound probe, the size of a small car, will attempt to change the orbit of Dimorphos, a football stadium-sized chunk of rock, around its parent asteroid, Didymos. .

If successful, NASA and other space agencies will be encouraged to pursue the mission by developing spacecraft that could deflect a larger asteroid heading toward Earth, thus avoiding an impact. Armageddon-Impact of style, astronomers say. If an asteroid the size of Dimorphos were to crash into Earth, it would set off an explosion equivalent to 400-600 megatons of TNT. “A city like Manhattan would be completely devastated,” Dart systems engineer Elena Adams told magazine. Sciences. “This is to demonstrate a technique to save the world.”

NASA has plans for several other asteroid missions next year, including the launch of the Psyche probe. Scheduled for liftoff in August, the spacecraft will visit an asteroid called 16 Psyche that is believed to be the leftover core of a planet. This large chunk of nickel and iron is the remains of a violent collision with another astronomical object that ripped the outer layers of the planet and exposed its metallic insides. Studying 16 Psyche will provide scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to examine a planetary core. It will also give you the opportunity to explore a new kind of world, one that is made of metal.

Human space flight

Boeing will attempt to put its Starliner crew capsule into orbit so that it can begin transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). A 2019 flight was unable to reach the station and another attempt last year was canceled at the last minute when the fuel valves failed to open. Boeing now plans to launch an unmanned Starliner in early 2022, followed by a test flight with astronauts later in the year. The capsule will then be used, along with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, in a rotation to transport astronauts to the ISS.

For its part, China is expected to complete its Tiangong space station – Heavenly Palace – after launching the first of its three main modules, Tianhe, in April. The Mengtian and Wentian modules will be added this year. China has said it hopes to keep its space station, which is considerably smaller than the ISS, continuously inhabited by three astronauts for at least a decade. A key task for the crew will be servicing the Xuntian Space Telescope, which will be launched in 2024 and will orbit in formation with the Tiangong station. Equipped with a mirror roughly the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope, Xuntian’s tasks will include investigations of dark matter and dark energy, as well as the formation and evolution of galaxies.

spacial tourism

Blue Origin (founded by Jeff Bezos) and Virgin Galactic (created by Richard Branson) managed to launch maiden suborbital flights last year and both say they hope to begin regular missions in 2022, offering tour groups a few minutes of weightlessness. before returning to Earth.