The ten-year report that will guide the choices of the American space agency was published yesterday. His proposals for future missions in the Solar System are tempting, and promise great adventures! A fascinating dive into future scientific missions and discoveries…
But beware, not all proposals will succeed.
Origins, worlds and life
It took 18 months of work to compile hundreds of publications, study the proposals, establish scientific groups across the country, and finally publish the report. Origin, Worlds and Life. The latter represents a consensus on the goals that American scientists want to explore and study in our Solar System for the coming decade. And as its name suggests, it focuses on broad themes to ask the most important questions that scientists want to answer through planetary exploration missions.
He succeeds Vision and Travels published in 2011… one of the key subjects of which, the return of samples from the planet Mars, has indeed been implemented since: the Perseverance rover is the first building block of the joint mission with ESA, Mars Sample Return. It is therefore not a Prévert-style inventory of what scientists would like, but a real guide to future proposals for NASA exploration projects. And it is for this reason that the 781 pages of the report (in free access on The National Academies) are talked about a lot.
Building on current developments…
Given the time it takes to prepare for an ambitious mission to the Solar System, the projects that are prioritized in the report have little or no chance of taking off in the decade to come, but as always, these are to start missions and approve projects as soon as possible to give them the best chance.
The most ambitious are the “Flagship”, whose budget ceiling is only set by politicians. We find there a frank and clear support of the missions already in development, in particular for Mars Sample Return (it will be necessary in the decade to come to recover the samples, then bring them back to Earth), the Europa Clipper probe which will take off in 2024 towards Jupiter and the Dragonfly multicopter drone that is slated to fly on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon by 2034. The report looked at the following missions…
… and propose equally ambitious ones for the future!
The most talked about mission, and the highest rated, is undoubtedly the project to study the planet Uranus. Passed over only once in 1986 with its moons, Uranus is the most accessible frozen giant and one of the least studied planets at the moment. And notwithstanding a 13-year journey, a probe could brake there to enter orbit and study it and its moons, without forgetting to drop a small atmospheric probe upon arrival. A rudimentary but very effective way to study the composition and the pressures on the spot…
The ten-year report gives the project the highest rating, but proposes another of the same rank, namely Enceladus Orbilander, a mission which would go to orbit of Saturn, would fly over Enceladus several times before landing there and d stay there to study the frozen moon from its surface. An eminently difficult objective, but at the height of the hoped-for scientific harvest: with its geysers composed mainly of water, Enceladus is one of the rare candidates of the Solar System to shelter forms of life.
The Moon and Mars, always on top
Two other missions with lower fixed budgets are the subject of a specific recommendation. There is Endurance-A, which takes place on the Moon, with a large autonomous robot capable of traveling several kilometers a day and collecting up to 120 kg of lunar samples to then deliver them either to a robotic vehicle… or to astronauts to bring them back to Earth. Particularity of this very enduring rover (it’s a bit like the name of the mission too): it would cross the entire South Pole (Aïtken basin) to accumulate up to 2,000 km of travel!
Mars Life Explorer, for its part, aims to land on or near the Martian polar caps to study the compounds of the ice, being specifically equipped to find (or not) organic compounds there. The mission would be the next “ground” opportunity after the various elements to bring back samples at the dawn of the 2030s.
So I can offer you…
Finally, other missions are mentioned with lesser degrees of priority, in particular because they can meet the criteria of missions with a lower budget. But they are ambitious too. It includes Centaur Orbiter and Lander (a mission to discover and collect samples from a comet between Jupiter and Saturn), Ceres Sample Return (a mission that would land on the “white spot” of the minor planet to bring back hardware), Titan Orbiter (an add-on to Dragonfly for studying Titan’s atmosphere) or Enceladus Multiple Flybys (in case the lander is too ambitious, it would fly within the geysers of Saturn’s moon to study samples), or even Triton Explorer (which would fly over Neptune’s moon only once). And there are many others, including those who still have to refine their scientific proposals so that they can “stick” to technical reality.
Finally, it should be noted that the ten-year report does not content itself with compiling the scientific objectives, but also takes stock of the budgetary reality of these missions. Without surprise, Origin, Worlds and Life concludes that current programs are not as well funded as expected…and that often proposals are deliberately scaled down before exploding their ceilings during development.
To anchor exploration projects in reality, the committees are asking for an envelope that is both broader and better controlled (reading between the lines, we understand that the slippage of Europa Clipper, which will cost billions more than planned, is one of the topics). Scientists also unanimously demand that NASA better fund its missions to detect and classify near-Earth asteroids.
So soon, Uranus?
It remains to be seen which of these proposals will be followed. They are not likely to constrain NASA, which remains a government agency and therefore ultimately under the control of political authorities, but greatly influence the selection of the various future projects. It would therefore not be surprising to find in one form or another, these very enticing missions in the flagship developments of the decade!
On the same subject :
Record distances for Perseverance and the Ingenuity helicopter in Jezero Crater
Source : space news
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