Astronomer Rafael Bachiller discovers in this series the most spectacular phenomena of the Cosmos. Topics of throbbing research, astronomical adventures and scientific news about the Universe analyzed in depth.
If in space activity 2019 it was the year of the Moon, 2020 will be the year of Mars since four spaceships will take off towards the red planet. In addition, we will attend the evolution of other missions already underway and we will see more manned ships take off.
After the moon
Now that the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the first human being on the Moon have ended, we can take stock of the space missions that, during the year, aimed at our satellite. China achieved a resounding success with its Chang'e 4 mission that deposited the Yutu 2 SUV on the hidden face, allowing it to study the characteristics of that little known area of the lunar surface.
Less successful were the Indian mission Chandrayaan 2 and the Israeli Beresheet because, in both cases, the vehicles that had to be posed did not achieve their objective when crashing on the lunar surface.
In addition to Chang'e 4, 2019 ended some outstanding successes: the Japanese probe Hayabusa 2 collected its samples from the small asteroid Ryugu and has already embarked on its journey back to Earth. NASA's Parker spacecraft, from the solar neighborhood, has offered us its first results on the wind and the magnetic field of the Sun. Finally, on December 18, ESA launched the CHEOPS space telescope devoted to the detailed study of exoplanets of 300 preselected stars. This is a mission in which Spain plays a very important role because the satellite has been built by Airbus in our country, its control is carried out from the INTA and several national institutions will collaborate in the exploitation of scientific results.
The year of Mars
The windows for the launch of probes to Mars take place approximately every two years, and the next one, which will take place in the month of July, will be very well used with four launches. There is no doubt that 2020 will be an exceptionally important year for Mars exploration.
This year, a race will begin between the US (collaborating with Europe) and China to collect samples on the red planet and transport them to Earth. A mission of NASA and another of China are aimed at testing the technology that will be developed in later years with the ambition to transport rocks from Mars to our planet on the horizon of 2031.
NASA plans to launch the Mars 2020 spacecraft. This mission includes an orbiter, a helicopter drone and an all-terrain vehicle (similar to the Curiosity) that will select samples on the surface of the red planet and leave them scattered around the surface of a crater called Jezero. This mission should be followed by another one in 2026 that, with the help of a robotic vehicle of European construction, would pick up those rocks and transport them to a rocket that would take off from Mars bound for Earth. The complete mission, which has the participation of the European Space Agency (ESA) and has been baptized MSR (Mars Sample Return), would end in 2031.
The Chinese space agency will launch the Huoxing 1 (Hx 1) mission that includes an orbiter and an SUV. It is again the first step of a much more ambitious project that is aimed at the collection and return of Martian rocks. The complete project includes two more probes that will take off in 2028. The first one will transport a vehicle that, already in 2029, would collect samples for deposit in a rocket and place them in the orbit of Mars in 2030. The second mission that would have taken off in 2028 He would collect those samples from the Martian orbit and move them to Earth. This return trip would take place between 2030 and 2031.
As we can see, these are extremely complex missions. Both parts, USA (with Europe) and China, are refining their plans and, looking sideways, adjusting the dates of the arrival of the Martian rocks to Earth. Each of them will try to be the first. There is no doubt that competition is a very important spur that has always encouraged space activity.
In addition to these two great missions (Mars 2020 and Hx 1), 2020 will see the launch of a mission of the United Arab Emirates (Hope Mars Mission) that would reach Mars in March 2021 and would remain in orbit taking images and spectra of the red planet in order to study its climate and seasonal cycles.
ESA, in collaboration with the Russian agency Roscosmos, will launch the Rosalind Franklin SUV (formerly called ExoMars). This vehicle will explore the Martian soil for at least seven months analyzing samples that will be extracted from the subsoil in order to search for biomolecules or biomarkers, definitively indications of some type of present or past life.
Other releases
In 2020, about a hundred space launches will be exceeded, but the Chinese mission Chang'e 5, which aims to bring lunar rocks to Earth, will be of special scientific relevance. It is the first return mission of lunar samples since 1974, when the Soviet mission Luna 24 transported 170 grams of lunar soil.
The Chang'e 5 will be followed by another sample return mission (Chang'e 6) thus completing this program. Looking at the longer term, this program constitutes preparations to conduct a manned moon landing in the 2030s and then begin the construction of a base at the south pole of the Moon.
Other space missions that will give much to talk about in 2020 are those that transport samples from asteroids. NASA's OsirisReX mission will take samples of the small asteroid Bennu during the month of July and the JAXA Hayabusa 2 probe will arrive on Earth in December with its samples of the asteroid Ryugu.
The Parker solar probe will continue its incursions in the vicinity of the king star. The BepiColombo continues the journey undertaken in 2018 towards Mercury, where its arrival is expected in December 2025. The TESS telescope will complete the first part of its mission to search for exoplanets (it has already located a thousand candidates) and, according to the approved plans recently by NASA, it will extend its observations until 2022.
The new manned ships
It is expected that, by 2020, Dragon 2 vehicles (from Space X) and the Starliner CST-100 (from Boeing) will make their first manned flights, which would restore the US's ability to put astronauts into orbit, a capacity that became extinct since that the space shuttle Atlantis made its last flight in 2011. The Dragon has already successfully joined the International Space Station in an unmanned test conducted last March.
We must not forget, however, that both vehicles have suffered numerous delays and that, specifically, the Dragon suffered an explosion during a test in Florida last April and the first unmanned Starliner test failed in its attempt to reach The space station just a few days ago. In parallel, NASA continues with the development of the Orion spacecraft, part of an ambitious project that should allow the US to travel to the Moon and Mars in the coming decades.
The astronomers nightmare
During 2020 we will also see the vertiginous progression in the launching of mega-constellations of satellites. The Starlink constellation (from Space X), built to facilitate broadband Internet connections, will initially have 1,600 satellites of which 122 are already in orbit. The launches by groups of 60 satellites will continue in 2020 and in the following years. By the middle of the decade, this constellation could include some 12,000 satellites. In parallel, Amazon is planning to launch a constellation, called Kuiper, of more than 3,000 satellites, Samsung plans another of almost 5,000 and there are several other projects that, each, include a thousand satellites.
It is expected that within a few years we will have tens of thousands of satellites orbiting our planet. Since the objective of such constellations is to guarantee complete coverage of the globe, from each point and at all times there will always be several of them that will be visible. After dark and before dawn, depending on their height, many of these satellites will remain illuminated by the Sun and will appear as bright spots that travel through the celestial vault.
Of course, this situation is already a nightmare for astronomers who begin to fear that the sky will be filled with those luminous points that will cross the field of view of an observation, leaving numerous traces in the long photographic exhibitions. Deep sky astronomy could become an impracticable discipline.
Of course, spectroscopic observations will also be affected. And the radio broadcasts of such satellites could also completely ruin radio astronomy. It is therefore essential that the satellite constellations are carefully planned, that only the essential ones are launched and that those that are launched do not reflect sunlight. With these projects humanity plays the possibility of contemplating and studying the cosmos.
Rafael Bachiller is director of the National Astronomical Observatory (National Geographic Institute) and academic of the Royal Academy of Doctors of Spain.
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