After a landmark year for the space agency, what’s NASA’s plans for 2016?
WE’VE seen Earth 2.0, Pluto like never before, and the chance of life on Mars. How will NASA possibly top 2015’s amazing year in space?
IT HAS been a landmark year for NASA.
In 2015 bold missions by the space agency were rewarded with game-changing revelations that inspired the awe of millions and turbocharged our knowledge of the solar system.
Major announcements about liquid water on Mars, a possible Earth 2.0, and New Horizon’s successful mission to far-flung Pluto, among others, skyrocketed to the top of news bulletins around the world and had all of us, and not for the first time, questioning what else — or who else — was out there.
“In terms of the study of our solar system, trying to figure out how we got there and for understanding where to look for life next, I’d say this year has been a great game-changer,” astronomer Amanda Bauer from the Australian Astronomical Observatory told news.com.au.
“Especially with New Horizons flying past Pluto. It took ten years for that spacecraft to get there, and for everything to work smoothly and perfectly and as predicted was so gratifying.
“It really gives us such an inspiring view about what there is to learn about how our planets formed, how our solar system formed, and maybe about how life got here. And I think what we’re finding is that it’s more complicated than we think: every time you find an answer, you have 10 new questions.”
The discovery of water on Mars and underground oceans on moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter, also brought us one giant leap closer to possibly finding extraterrestrial life, Dr Bauer said.
“That’s what we’ve been looking for. Liquid water is what we think we need for life to exist, so the fact that it’s popping up in all different places brings great excitement,” she said.
“We did think where there’s water there might be life, but it seemed like liquid water would be a hard thing to produce ... and now that we’re actually seeing evidence of it and detecting it in so many more places, it gives us hope that maybe there are signs of life, even on a microbial level.”
This year NASA also achieved major milestones in its mission to get humans to Mars, such as successfully growing lettuce in space as a possible future food source on the red planet.
It also launched an experiment involving two NASA astronauts and twin brothers — one based on the International Space Station and the other on Earth — to measure the effect of microgravity on human bodies.
THE NEXT FRONTIER
But as the space agency gears up for 2016, can it possibly top this amazing year in space?
Dr Bauer said we should look out for spacecraft Juno reaching Jupiter’s orbit on July 4.
Juno was launched back in 2011 on a mission to unlock mysteries about our solar system’s largest planet.
“This will give us clues about what is below the upper surface of Jupiter — whether or not there’s a core, how much water there might be, what its atmosphere is actually made of,” Dr Bauer said.
“There are so many questions we have about Jupiter. It’s our nearest example of a failed star, a giant planet. Pluto is a smaller body, but understanding Jupiter will help us understand how the big planets form.”
Mars will be another huge focus for astronomers in the new year, and not just at NASA.
In March the European Space Agency and Russian Federal Space Agency will launch their Schiaparelli lander and trace gas orbiter as part of their joint study into Martian atmospheric gases.
NASA will also soon launch its InSight robotic lander in a bid to find out how rocky planets in the inner solar system formed more than four billion years ago.
Both spacecraft are scheduled to reach the red planet later next year.
NASA also plans to send a spacecraft to an asteroid in 2016. It will take three years for OSIRIS-REx to reach the primitive, near-Earth asteroid designated 1999 RQ36, but if successful, it would be the first US mission to pluck samples from an asteroid and return them to Earth.
And sky-gazers will also be rewarded with some spectacular celestial phenomena in 2016.
All five naked-eye planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — will be visible in the morning sky between January 20 and February 20.
There will also be a total solar eclipse on March 9. It will be best seen from Indonesia and the Pacific Ocean, but Victorian and West Australian sky-gazers will be able to catch a glimpse of a partial solar eclipse that day.
Dr Bauer, who was this year named among Australia’s top five under 40 science communicators, has her sights set on the galaxy, looking at how stars are formed and what fuel is required for their formation.
She said it was always gratifying to see the public reach fever-pitch levels of excitement about the work of astronomers and discoveries in space.
“I think whatever culture you’re from you have these questions about where we come from, why we’re here and what’s going to happen in our future,” she said.
“I think being able to see that in the news is something that can bring us all together, have us talk about those questions and unite us, as opposed to all the bad news we see.
“There are so many types of people coming together to work on these projects to make them successful. It’s not just one person — it’s all of humanity working together to build on its knowledge over time to create those achievements.
“But you can’t really predict the exciting things we’re going to find. There are so many ongoing missions and you just can’t tell what they’re going to achieve.”
OUR YEAR IN SPACE
In case you missed them, or you’re in a nostalgic mood, these are some of the most exciting discoveries, achievements and updates from space in 2015.
NEW HORIZONS REACHES PLUTO
In a trailblazing mission nine years in the making, NASA space probe New Horizons reached Pluto on July 14. Scenes of jubilation from the New Horizons control room were beamed across the world as the probe cruised just 12,500 kilometres above the distant dwarf planet.
Images by New Horizons have captured Pluto, its giant moon Charon and smaller moons in amazing detail, revealing mountains, glaciers and plains. Because of transmission delays, we’re still getting new images of this far-flung world.
New Horizons launched in 2006, the same year Pluto was stripped of its status as our solar system’s ninth planet. But the overwhelming global media attention to the New Horizons mission proved the planetary underdog is still as popular as ever on Earth. New Horizons is now gearing up for a fly-by of the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU on New Year’s Day in 2019.
DAWN ENTERS CERES’ ORBIT
But New Horizons wasn’t the first NASA spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet. That title belongs to the Dawn probe, which entered orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres three months earlier, on March 6.
Ceres is the final stop for Dawn, which launched in 2007 on a voyage to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that is littered with rocky leftovers from the formation of the sun and planets some 4.5 billion years ago. Dawn is now in the midst of its 16-month exploration of the dwarf planet, which includes capturing images of its icy surface.
“Ceres looks like a fully formed planet having a permanent ice age,” Astrophysicist Dr Alan Duffy of Swinburne University said.
“With Ceres something has stopped the baby planet from growing any further.” Dawn’s exploration may well help unlock that mystery.
WATER FOUND ON MARS
In a game-changing announcement on September 29, NASA said its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft had found the best evidence yet of flowing water on the red planet.
“As we inject the soils, they’re moist, they’re hydrated, they’re full of water,” announced Jim Green, the Director of Planetary Science at NASA.
“Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past. Liquid water has been found on Mars.”
Scientists found streaks, known as recurring lope lineae, on the planet’s surface and a very small amount of water.
A GLOBAL OCEAN ON ENCELADUS
The possibility of extraterrestrial life was again raised on September 16 when NASA scientists confirmed there was a global ocean lying beneath the icy veneer of Enceladus, a small moon orbiting Saturn. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft also found evidence of hydrothermal activity on Enceladus, meaning it could have the ingredients needed to support simple life.
A month after that announcement, Cassini took its deepest-ever dive into plumes of icy spray erupting from the moon to capture more data from its underground ocean. Huge salty oceans containing more water than all the oceans on Earth were also confirmed this year on Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede.
Ganymede and Enceladus are two of our best bets so far for possible alien life. Another favourite is Europa, one of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, which may have an ocean of its own. NASA’s $41 million Europa mission is scheduled to launch in the 2020s.
A MARTIAN MISSION
This year NASA revealed more if its bold plan for a human mission to the red planet.
“Like the Apollo Program, we embark on this journey for all humanity. Unlike Apollo, we will be going to stay,” the space agency said in a document released on October 8.
“Mars is an achievable goal ... We are developing the capabilities necessary to get there, land there, and live there.”
In August NASA tested its RS-25 engine, which may rocket Earthlings to Mars. That month it also locked six people inside a dome in Hawaii for a month-long stay in the space agency’s longest-ever isolation experiment to prepare for the pioneering human mission.
And in another massive breakthrough in August, three NASA astronauts became the first to sample multi-million dollar space-grown lettuce leaves, a development scientists said could unlock the future of space travel.
EARTH 2.0 DISCOVERED
No one had heard of Kepler-452b before this year, but in July, this strange new world created headlines. Astronomers hunting for another Earth announced they had found the closest match yet.
“Today we’re announcing the discovery of an exoplanet that as far as we can tell, is a pretty close cousin to the Earth and our sun,” NASA said on July 24.
“This is about the closest twin to Earth 2.0 that we’ve found so far, and I really emphasise so far.”
Not much is known about this exoplanet. Data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope says it’s about 60 per cent bigger than Earth and is in a 385-day orbit around a yellow star about 20 per cent bigger than our sun. It’s also suspected of being made up of silicon, carbon and iron, suggesting Kepler-452b could be our planet’s bigger, older cousin.
“We always predicted that there would be planets like this,” University of NSW astrobiologist Prof Malcolm Walter said. “But prediction is not the same as a discovery. And now we have a discovery.”
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