One of the difficult things about publicizing space exploration and keeping people excited, it seems to me, is the lengthy time frame of the typical mission. From design and construction through launch and transit and finally consummation, years can pass, during which the public’s attention is understandably directed elsewhere. [Rosetta, for example, launched in March, but won’t finish its mission until 2014. When it does, though, it’s gonna land on a comet. I mean, whoa.
Anyway, I’m starting this thread because there’s some neat stuff being completed in the next couple of years, projects that have been underway for a while and are now nearing their due dates, and it’s fun to think about what’s coming up.
For example:
[url=http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/]Stardust](http://www.esa.int/export/esaMI/Rosetta/index.html) — Back on January 2, this mission’s historic rendezvous with Comet Wild 2 was hugely overshadowed by the much more photogenic twin Mars rovers. But this is a very cool operation indeed; the spacecraft passed by the comet at a distance of less than 150 miles (the width of an eyelash, in space terms) and deployed an aerogel collector to pick up samples of cometary dust. A year and a half from now, the craft will return to Earth so the particulates can be analyzed.
And then there’s:
Cassini-Huygens — This mission is currently on its final approach and within months will get to The Really Good Part. The Cassini orbiter will separate from the Huygens probe at the end of this year; while the orbiter spends four years cruising the Saturn system, the probe will dive into the atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon and one of the top candidates in the solar system for finding organic material off our own planet. Two and a half hours after entering the atmosphere, the probe will land on the surface, whatever it may be (ground, or methane seas?).
But don’t forget:
The Large Binocular Telescope Observatory — Not a project in space, but a very clever use of engineering to get unprecedented resolution from an ground-based facility. The Arizona-based telescope will use two separate mirrors, mounted parallel to one another, and an array of fast computers to analyze the paired images and adaptively cancel out atmospheric distortion, among other tricks. The upshot is that for some applications, LBT will be better than Hubble. I couldn’t find a detailed and up-to-date timeline on the site, but it appears that “first light” is going to happen, well, pretty much any time now.
And speaking of telescopes, there’s also the Spitzer space telescope, which launched in 2003 and has been returning great images for a while now, including star nurseries and spectral separations. Yes, this one’s already running, but as we saw with Hubble the really cool stuff didn’t start happening right away; it’s likely that as Spitzer continues its operation some really clever experiments will be designed and some amazing observations returned, which is why I’m sort of lumping it with the other pending projects.
There’s plenty more coming, though of course anybody who follows this stuff knows that you can’t count on anything until the mission actually happens successfully. It might be cancelled at the last minute for financial or political reasons, or the equipment might fail (as the ESA and Japanese agencies have experienced recently on separate missions). And who knows what the Chinese have planned besides their stated goal of landing someone on the moon? That’s why I’ve tried to focus on projects that are already solidly underway, as stuff on the drawing board is still pretty much vaporware and isn’t guaranteed to happen. Still, if there are some great concepts brewing, sure, let’s include them.
As far as which upcoming mission excites me the most, I’m torn between Huygens and Stardust. The former could be amazing, but given how our previous close examinations of various large bodies never seem to give us what we expect, it’s possible Titan’s just gonna be another big rock. Stardust, on the other hand, is almost guaranteed to be spectacular, simply for the fact that we’ll be getting a firsthand look at some of the oldest primordial material in the solar system. For that reason, Rosetta also may be pretty thrilling, but I’m going to wait to see what happens with Stardust before thinking about what Rosetta might be able to deliver beyond it.
What say you?
P.S. Anticipating the killjoys who think all of this is a waste of time and money, please take it to GD or the Pit. The question being asked here is about which project is most anticipated by people who follow this stuff, not about whether space exploration in general is worthwhile. There’re plenty of other threads for that already without hijacking another one.