2022 preview: A round-up of the year's most exciting space missions - New Scientist

A major component of NASA?s Psyche spacecraft has been delivered to NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the phase known as assembly, test, and launch operations (ATLO) is now underway. This photo, shot March 28, 2021 shows engineers and technicians preparing to move the Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) Chassis from its shipping container to a dolly in High Bay 1 of JPL?s Spacecraft Assembly Facility. The photo was captured just after the chassis was delivered to JPL by Maxar Technologies. Maxar?s team in Palo Alto, California, designed and built the SEP Chassis, which includes all the primary and secondary structure and the hardware components needed for the high-power electrical system, the propulsion system, the thermal system, guidance and navigation sensors and actuators, and the high-gain antenna. Over the next year, additional hardware will be added to the spacecraft including the command and data handling system, a power distribution assembly, the X-band telecommunications hardware suite, three science instruments (two imagers, two magnetometers, and a gamma ray neutron Spectrometer), and a deep space optical communications technology demonstrator. The spacecraft will finish assembly and then undergo rigorous checkout and testing before being shipped to NASA?s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for an August 2022 launch to the main asteroid belt. Psyche will arrive at the metal-rich asteroid of the same name in 2026, orbiting for 21 months to investigate its composition. Scientists think that Psyche is made up of mostly iron and nickel ? similar to Earth?s core. Exploring the asteroid could give valuable insight into how our own planet and others formed. Arizona State University in Tempe leads the mission. JPL is responsible for the mission?s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. For more information about NASA?s Psyche mission, go to: http://www.nasa.gov/psyche or https://psyche.asu.edu/ Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech — The Psyche spacecraft’s propulsion system undergoes inspection

NASA/JPL-CALTECH

IF ALL goes well, the first major space mission of 2022 will be the launch of the Space Launch System rocket in February. After many budget and schedule overruns, NASA’s colossal rocket is finally set for its first uncrewed flight, which will carry several small satellites into orbits either near or around the moon.

They won’t be the only lunar visitors. NASA has contracted private firms to send nine rovers to the moon, along with landers and other experiments. “Many of these are tests of this new idea that NASA is pushing, on whether commercial companies can deliver payloads to the moon, accepting higher risk for lower cost,” says Jim Bell at Arizona State University. “It’s a new paradigm for space missions, and a real renaissance in lunar robotics.”

“Psyche could be the exposed core of an ancient shattered, disrupted protoplanet”

Japan and the Russian space agency Roscosmos will also send landers, and India and the United Arab Emirates are each sending a lander and rover, as are firms in Germany and the UK.

NASA has its sights set on an asteroid called Psyche, too, with plans to launch a mission of the same name in August. It will visit the strange space rock, which is made mostly of iron and could teach us how planets form and what their metallic cores are like.

“The leading hypothesis is that Psyche could be the exposed core of an ancient shattered, disrupted protoplanet. It could be a snapshot in time of planets forming early in our solar system,” says Bell, a member of the Psyche team.

The mission will take four years to reach Psyche, where it will take photos, analyse the chemical composition of the asteroid and measure its interior structure and magnetic field. The aim is to figure out whether Psyche is an ancient planetary core, determine how it formed and extend those inferences to understand terrestrial planets.

Mars will also be a feature of 2022. In September, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos will launch the Rosalind Franklin rover, which should arrive on Mars in 2023. The rover will be larger than China’s Zhurong rover, but smaller than NASA’s Perseverance rover, both of which landed on the planet last February. It will attempt to find evidence of life in an area called Oxia Planum, which may have once been friendly to life.

Rosalind Franklin will carry several cameras and scientific instruments, but perhaps most exciting is a drill that can collect samples from up to 2 metres below the surface – far deeper than the 6 centimetre record set by NASA’s Curiosity rover.

Drilling provides access to clues about the planet’s past that have been lost at the surface by ionising radiation from space, says Jorge Vago, project scientist for the mission. “Over billions of years, it acts like millions of little knives, cutting away at the molecules that we would like to study to look for potential signs of life.”