This article was originally featured in The Conversation.
The year 2023 proved to be an important one for space missions, with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returning a sample from an asteroid and India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission exploring the lunar south pole, and 2024 is shaping up to be another exciting year for space exploration.
Several new missions under NASA’s Artemis plan and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative will target the Moon.
The latter half of the year will feature several exciting launches, with the launch of the Martian Moons eXploration mission in September, Europa Clipper and Hera in October and Artemis II and VIPER to the Moon in November–if everything goes as planned.
I’m a planetary scientist, and here are six of the space missions I’m most excited to follow in 2024.
1. Europa Clipper
NASA will launch Europa Clipper, which will explore one of Jupiter’s largest moons, Europa. Europa is slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon, with a surface made of ice. Beneath its icy shell, Europa likely harbors a saltwater ocean, which scientists expect contains over twice as much water as all the oceans here on Earth combined.
With Europa Clipper, scientists want to investigate whether Europa’s ocean could be a suitable habitat for extraterrestrial life.
The mission plans to do this by flying past Europa nearly 50 times to study the moon’s icy shell, its surface’s geology and its subsurface ocean. The mission will also look for active geysers spewing out from Europa.
This mission will change the game for scientists hoping to understand ocean worlds like Europa.
The launch window–the period when the mission could launch and achieve its planned route–opens Oct. 10, 2024, and lasts 21 days. The spacecraft will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030.
2. Artemis II launch
The Artemis program, named after Apollo’s twin…
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