What's Next in Space?

Probes and landers sent into the final frontier will bring us closer to answering cosmic mysteries

  • By Mark Strauss
  • Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2010, Subscribe
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Titan moon
NASA is studying a mission, for launch in the 2020s, that would visit the only moon known to have an extensive atmosphere—Titan, a satellite of Saturn. (Space Science Institute / JPL / NASA)

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Meanwhile, the earlier NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission—launched in 1997 to explore Saturn and its moons—might be extended to 2017, enabling scientists to collect data on weather changes as the ringed planet enters its summer solstice.

Launched in 2004, ESA’s Rosetta probe will rendezvous with comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. A lander will study the surface, and an orbiter will follow the comet another two years.

The Cosmos
NASA’s NuSTAR (launch date: 2012) will rely on high-energy X-rays to study the cosmos. Among its missions will be gazing at supernovas, or exploded stars, for clues explaining how and why they self-destruct.

Designed to penetrate dust clouds, NASA’s CALISTO orbiting observatory (launch: 2015) will search interstellar space for traces of organic molecules, the building blocks of life.

The James Webb Space Telescope (launch: 2014) will collect infrared radiation with a mirror 21 feet in diameter. The goal is to study signals generated when stars and galaxies formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang 12 billion to 14 billion years ago. NASA’s Weiler says the telescope “will have the ability to look back at the birth of matter itself.”

Mark Strauss is a senior editor.


“I am convinced we will find past or present life in the solar system or on a planet surrounding another star in the next 40 years,” says Edward Weiler, an astrophysicist and associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Weiler’s prediction is based partly on recent discoveries of creatures living in extreme environments previously considered uninhabitable, such as 600 feet beneath the ice in Antarctica, where a shrimp-like critter has been found. “As long as we have water, energy and organic material,” Weiler says, “the potential for life is everywhere.” He hopes the imminent discovery of extraterrestrial life will finally put to rest the idea that Earth is unique: “It is the last crumb on the plate of human arrogance.”

Though sending humans into space might stir the greatest public attention, there are no solid plans for doing so in the near or even distant future. But space-based science will boom. Here’s a celestial mystery tour of future probes and observatories due to be launched by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA):

Inner Planets
NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) probe, launched in 2004, will become the first spacecraft to orbit the planet closest to the Sun on March 18, 2011. Three years later, a joint ESA-JAXA mission will send the BepiColombo spacecraft to Mercury, where it will map the planet and investigate its magnetosphere. Scientists hope to learn whether ice exists in permanently shadowed craters near the poles.

NASA’s robotic Mars Science Laboratory (launch: 2011) is a rover that will analyze soil and rock samples, looking for organic materials. One key question is whether Mars ever was—or is currently—capable of supporting microbial life. Later in the decade, the joint NASA-ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (launch: 2016) will study the Martian atmosphere, paying special attention to methane gas, first detected in 2003. Because one source of methane is biological activity, it’s conceivable that life might currently exist on Mars.

Closer to home, NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission (launch date: 2011) will send twin spacecraft in tandem orbits around the Moon; the satellites will work together to make highly sensitive gravitational field measurements. This data will allow scientists to map the lunar interior, from crust to core.

Outer Planets
A joint NASA-ESA Europa Jupiter System Mission (possible launch: 2020) will send two robotic orbiters to conduct a three-year study of Jupiter and its moons: Europa (beneath its icy surface an ocean might contain enough oxygen to support life), Ganymede (it’s the only moon that has an internally generated magnetic field), Io (the solar system’s most volcanically active body) and Callisto (its heavily cratered icy crustmight hide an ocean deep in its interior).

NASA is studying a mission, for launch in the 2020s, that would visit the only moon known to have an extensive atmosphere—Titan, a satellite of Saturn. The concept consists of a balloon that would hover in Titan’s nitrogen-rich clouds, a lander that would splash down in one of its methane seas and an orbiter that would relay data, in addition to making atmospheric measurements.

Meanwhile, the earlier NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission—launched in 1997 to explore Saturn and its moons—might be extended to 2017, enabling scientists to collect data on weather changes as the ringed planet enters its summer solstice.

Launched in 2004, ESA’s Rosetta probe will rendezvous with comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. A lander will study the surface, and an orbiter will follow the comet another two years.

The Cosmos
NASA’s NuSTAR (launch date: 2012) will rely on high-energy X-rays to study the cosmos. Among its missions will be gazing at supernovas, or exploded stars, for clues explaining how and why they self-destruct.

Designed to penetrate dust clouds, NASA’s CALISTO orbiting observatory (launch: 2015) will search interstellar space for traces of organic molecules, the building blocks of life.

The James Webb Space Telescope (launch: 2014) will collect infrared radiation with a mirror 21 feet in diameter. The goal is to study signals generated when stars and galaxies formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang 12 billion to 14 billion years ago. NASA’s Weiler says the telescope “will have the ability to look back at the birth of matter itself.”

Mark Strauss is a senior editor.


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Comments (6)

I happen to be eager to know what's up there in the whole wide universe since my childhood. Thanks to you people I have begun reading about the secrets of the universe though not fully. I always pray not to die before the existence or non existence of some kind of life somewhere else other than our earth. I am an old pensioned teacher in the horn of Africa-Ethiopia to be precise.

Posted by Tesfaye Gebremariam on February 18,2011 | 09:12 AM

Good point, Lynn.

If we discover life on Titan, it's likely to be very different from life here on earth, made of different materials and designed to thrive in a different range of temperature.

I think, given all the potential energy sources on Titan, and the fact that there's a weather system here (weather being an integral part of the biosystem on earth), there's likely life of some sort on Titan.

Best prospect though would be Mars, in the form of some "immortal" bacterial spores sleeping for millions of years in await of the Martian "summer."

Posted by chello on October 25,2010 | 07:25 PM

In support of my comment above, see Seti astronomer Seth Shostak's argument in Acta Astronautica, or at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449

Posted by Lynn Austin on August 23,2010 | 09:04 AM

We need to start Terra-forming MARS

Posted by David Acuna on August 17,2010 | 11:23 AM

Pardon my naiveté. I have often heard that it is arrogant for us humans to insist that the only life is on Earth, opening the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. However, in this article it was preceded by a statement that gave the restricted formula for “life” anywhere as being constituted of water, energy, and organic material. Isn’t it arrogant to insist that “life” is limited to what we consider “life”? Couldn’t there be other forms of entities that reproduce, grow, and die (another Earthling’s definition of life) but are constituted of other material?

Posted by Lynn Austin on August 13,2010 | 02:40 PM

Given the way NASA is going, what's next in space is most likely a Chinese space station and moon base, while the US watches with sadness at what could have been them but was squandered away on useless bureacracy and feel-good "environmental" and "outreach" projects well outside the stated mission of NASA or indeed the US government.

Posted by J.T. Wenting on July 22,2010 | 01:19 PM



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