The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has big plans for space exploration over the next two decades. According to an illustration created by Bob Al-Green from the Mashable portal, NASA intends to launch many different space missions by 2030, ranging from re-exploring the moon and ending with a manned flight to the Red Planet.
The flight plan will begin in September 2013, when NASA's LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer) will set off on a 160-day journey to explore the lunar surface. At the end of 2013, the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) mission starts. The task of the future mission will be to determine what the climate of Mars actually was. Scientists plan to find out by studying the upper layers of the atmosphere of the Red Planet, the ionosphere, and also by analyzing the interaction of the Sun and the solar wind on the planet.
The Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission starts next year, the essence of which will be the search for an answer to how the magnetic fields of the Sun and the Earth interact with each other. For this task, NASA is going to use four identical spacecraft. In 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft finally passes by Pluto and its moons, covering a distance of more than 4 billion kilometers.
The next two missions are planned for 2016. The mission of Juno will be to explore the secrets of the largest planet in our solar system - Jupiter. In turn, the InSight spacecraft will be sent to Mars in order to drill deeper holes in it to learn more about its structure and history.
In 2017, the TESS mission will begin, within the framework of which several space telescopes will look for new potentially inhabited exoplanets next to the stars closest to our Sun.
In 2018, NASA will launch the Solar Probe Plus, whose task will be to study the external atmosphere of the sun. The same year, it is planned to launch the most advanced new-generation space telescope - James Webb Telescope, which will search for new galaxies and will be able to look much deeper into the Universe than all its predecessors. The last mission for 2018 is the launch of the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft, which will approach the 1999 RQ36 asteroid, with its robotic arm will take samples of its soil and return with them to Earth in 2023.
After a two-year break, in 2020, a mission will begin to launch a new Martian rover, whose task will be to search for traces of life and other patterns that once existed on the Red Planet.
The year 2025 should be remembered by mankind for the year when the mission for controlled flight to an asteroid starts, based on data received by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft.
The 2030th may finally become the year when one-way manned mission will be sent to Mars and subsequently the first Martian colony will be created on the Red Planet.
The article is based on materials .
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