First privately built landers on the Moon
The Israeli Beresheet probe, built by the company
SpaceIL, made it to the lunar surface last year, but it ended with a crash landing. This coming year will very likely see the first fully successful commercial lander touch down on the Moon. NASA has
contracted with two companies, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, to create the
Peregrine-1 and
IM-1 landers.
Astrobotic's Peregrine will carry 11 instruments, measuring the chemistry, magnetism, and radiation levels on the lunar surface. It will also bring along a Lunar Library: a set of nickel disks etched with an encyclopedia of human knowledge, replicating a set that was lost with Beresheet.
Intuitive Machine's IM-1, meanwhile, will have 5 instruments that focus on navigation experiments and a radio detector designed to do unique studies of low-frequency astronomical sources.
Russia and India return to the Moon?
More than four decades after the Soviet Luna 24 lunar mission, Russia plans to resume robotic exploration of the Moon with
Luna 25. The much-delayed mission, which has been under development since the late 1990s, is tentatively set for launch in October 2021. Luna 25 is supposed to initiate a new series of Luna missions in the 2020s. If it fails, the future of Russia's space-exploration program will look shaky.
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is attempting its own rebound with the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander. It is scheduled for a late 2021 launch, although that could slip to 2022. Its predecessor (Chandrayaan-2, obviously) crash-landed on the Moon in 2019; in the meantime, India's rival China has conducted two high-profile Moon missions. The new mission will mostly repeat Chandrayaan-2's goals, placing a lander and rover on the Moon, but this time around an orbiter is not part of the program.
A fleet of science cubesats aboard Artemis-1
NASA has been working on plans to bring humans back to the Moon since...well, a really long time. The agency's huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket has also been in development for many years. Things are supposed to get serious in November 2021, with the Artemis-1 mission, which will use SLS to send an uncrewed version of the new Orion capsule to the Moon. Thirteen
small missions will hitch along for the ride. These include three lunar orbiters —
Lunar Flashlight,
Lunar IceCube, and
LunaH-Map — that will study water on the Moon's surface.
Also tucked away on Artemis-1 will be NEA Scout, an innovative spacecraft that will use a solar sail to maneuver to a near-Earth asteroid using only sunshine as its propellant. This mission could be the harbinger of more solar-sail driven space missions.
First real test of planetary defense
I've written about this one
before: The DART spacecraft, launching this July, will fly to a double asteroid and perform a direct collision with the smaller member of the pair, a 160-meter-wide rock or rubble pile called Dimorphos. NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have fired projectiles at a comet and an asteroid before, but this will be by far the most ambitious test of the technology needed to deflect an asteroid if it is determined to be on a hazardous path that could lead to a collision with the Earth.
DART will attempt, for the first time, to measurably change the path of an asteroid by hitting it with a kinetic impactor.
The International Science Armada descends on Mars
In February, robotic probes from three different nations will arrive at Mars, each representing a milestone in the exploration of the Red Planet.
NASA's Perseverance rover, built on the same basic bones as the earlier Curiosity rover but carrying significantly different instruments, will conduct in-depth chemical surveys of the Martian surface to look for chemical evidence of ancient life. Even more significant, Perseverance will cache the most intriguing Mars samples so that they can be collected and brought back to Earth by a join NASA-European Space Agency mission later in the 2020s.
The United Arab Emirates is sending the
Al Amal (Hope) mission to Mars. If successful, it will be the first deep-space science mission conducted by an Arab nation. The spacecraft, developed in collaboration with the University of Colorado-Boulder, is designed to be the most comprehensive weather satellite ever sent to Mars, studying the planet's daily and seasonal atmospheric changes.
Building on a series of increasingly ambitious lunar missions, China's space agency developed the Tianwen-1 (Heavenly Questions) probe to extend its reach to Mars. It already made history by ejecting a small camera and establishing a wifi link with the main spacecraft, allowing a unique self-portrait while en route.