NASA ‘Should’ve Looked Twice Before Posting These Apollo Moon Mission Images’

It’s been an eventful year for space exploration, with successes including the completion of Nasa’s Artemis 1 mission (finally), the inauguration of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the completion of China’s Tiangong space station.

2023 is set to be another busy year. Here are five of the most exciting missions to watch out for.

1. Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer

In April, the European Space Agency (Esa) is set to launch the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice), in what will be Europe’s first dedicated robotic mission to Jupiter. Juice is due to reach the planet in July 2031 after performing an incredible flight path through the Solar System. The mission will enter into orbit around Jupiter and perform numerous flybys of its large icy moons: Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

After four years of moon flybys, Juice will then enter into orbit around Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System – becoming the first spacecraft ever to reach orbit around the moon of another planet. The icy moons of Jupiter are interesting as they are all believed to host oceans of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces. Europa, in particular, is regarded as one of the most likely abodes in the Solar System for extra-terrestrial life.

Juice will be equipped with ten scientific instruments including ice-penetrating radar to study the internal oceans. This use of radar is a practical first step in mapping the sub-surface oceans, paving the way for more exotic future missions involving submersible vehicles – some of which have already been put forward. The launch window runs from April 5 to April 25.

2. SpaceX Starship

Although no date has been announced by aerospace company SpaceX at the time of writing, the first orbital test flight of the super-heavy Starship spacecraft is highly anticipated to occur in early 2023. Starship will be the largest spacecraft capable of carrying humans from Earth to destinations in space (the International Space Station is larger, but it was assembled in space). It will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever to fly, capable of lifting 100 tonnes of cargo to low Earth orbit.

Starship is the collective name for a two-component system consisting of the Starship spacecraft (which carries the crew and cargo) and the Super Heavy rocket. The rocket component will lift Starship to some 65km altitude before separating and returning to Earth in a controlled landing. The upper Starship component will then use its own engines to push itself the rest of the way to orbit.

Several short test flights of the Starship portion of the system have been made with varying degrees of success. But the upcoming flight will be the first time the whole system will be used to reach space as one. This first orbital flight was originally scheduled to launch in September 2022, but has been delayed several times.

3. dearMoon

The long-awaited dearMoon project, which will take members of the public on a six-day trip around the Moon and back, is due for launch on Starship and was originally planned for 2023. The exact date will depend on the successful test of Starship, but has been on the books since 2018. It will be the first true deep space tourism launch.

Financed by business entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, a competition was set up to select eight members of the public (and an unknown number of crew) to join Maezawa on the trip – all completely paid for. The winners and criteria used have not been disclosed, although it is suspected the guests may be established or aspiring artists.

This mission will mark a big change in the way we think about space, as previously only astronauts picked using incredibly stringent criteria have been able to go into deep space (note: we are not counting brief 10-minute jaunts up to 100 km). A full trip of several days poses extreme risks, both in terms of health and engineering.

The success or failure of the dearMoon mission could affect whether deep space tourism becomes the next big thing, or it is relegated back to being a pipe-dream.

4. Asteroid explorer returns to Earth

The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security – Regolith Explorer, mercifully more commonly known as OSIRIS-REx, is a Nasa mission to near-Earth asteroid Bennu. A key goal of this robotic mission was to acquire samples of Bennu and return them to Earth for analysis.

OSIRIS-REx is now fast returning to Earth with up to a kilogram of precious asteroid samples stored aboard. If all goes well, the capsule will detach from the spacecraft, enter the Earth’s atmosphere and parachute to a soft landing in the deserts of Utah on September 24. Asteroid sample return has only been achieved once before, by the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa 2 mission in 2020.

Bennu is an approximately diamond-shaped world just half a kilometre in size, but has many interesting characteristics. It is believed to have broken off from a much larger asteroid in the first 10 million years of the Solar System. Some of the minerals detected within it have been altered by water, implying that Bennu’s ancient parent body possessed liquid water.

It also has an abundance of precious metals, including gold and platinum. Finally, Bennu is classed as a potentially hazardous object with a (very) small possibility of Earth impact in the next century.

5. India’s private space launch

While SpaceX is the most prominent private space launch company, there are many others developing their own series of launchers around the world. Skyroot Aerospace, which successfully launched its Vikram-S rocket in November 2022, is soon to become the first private Indian company to launch a satellite.

The rocket itself reached 90km in altitude, a distance that would need to be improved upon to get a constellation of satellites into orbit. Skyroot’s first satellite launch is planned for 2023, with a goal of undercutting the cost of private space launch rivals by producing its 3D-printed rockets in a matter of days. If successful, this could also provide a route for cheaper launches of scientific missions, enabling a faster rate of research.

A gleaming new Hubble Space Telescope image captures the glow of thousands upon thousands of stars in an ancient globular cluster near the Milky Way’s heart.

A globular cluster is a massive collection of stars that are attracted in close and tied together by their mutual gravitation, with many stars only a light-year or two apart. The globular cluster in the new Hubble Space Telescope image, known as Pismis 26, was discovered in 1959 by astronomer Paris Pismis at the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico.

The stars in Pismis 26 have a nearly spherical structure. The cluster appears to be mostly red stars, with a few brighter blue stars along the edges. These colors are due, in part, to the cluster’s age, which is estimated to be around 12 billion years, implying that it contains many of the oldest stars in our galaxy, if not the universe. These stars are most likely a much deeper red than the bright-blue stars typical of large, young, fast-burning stars that die out much sooner, or the typical yellow star that straddles the two.

Additionally, the cluster is heavily metallic, which means that its stars have higher concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium than stars like the sun do. According to a NASA statement, scientists believe these stars are particularly rich in nitrogen, implying that the globular cluster’s star population spans a range of ages.

Furthermore, the cluster’s color is influenced by a phenomenon known as reddening, which occurs when dense stellar dust blocks shorter-wavelength blue light while allowing longer-wavelength red light to pass through more easily.

Pismis 26 is close to the galactic bulge that surrounds Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Because of the presence of Sgr A* and its incredible gravity, as well as that of all the material surrounding it in the bulge and the dense sphere of stars it contains, this region of the galaxy is especially dust-heavy.

Over the coming months, a celestial object that was last observed when Neanderthals walked the planet will be visible if you look up into the sky.

A comet was discovered on March 2, 2022, by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility using a wide-field survey camera. The comet is estimated to orbit the Sun once every 50,000 years, which means the last time we saw it was during the Upper Paleolithic period, when humans began to expand across Asia and Europe.

The comet, dubbed "C/2022 E3 (ZTF)," is currently too faint to be seen without a telescope. However, it is possible to see with the naked eye between the end of January and the beginning of February 2023.

The comet is currently approaching perihelion (its closest approach to the Sun), which will take place on January 12. On February 1, it will be closest to Earth, known as perigee. It may be visible to the naked eye at this point, though Sky at Night notes that it would most likely look like a smudge of chalk dust on a chalk board rather than the dazzling display put on by comet Neowise.

The comet, which was originally thought to be an asteroid before the coma was spotted, was discovered using a 1.2 meter telescope. It will pass Earth safely at a distance of approximately 42.5 million kilometers (26.4 million miles) on February 1. The comet is expected to become brighter than magnitude 6 and thus become visible to the naked eye from a dark-sky location.

It is no exaggeration to say the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) represents a new era for modern astronomy.

Launched on December 25 last year and fully operational since July, the telescope offers glimpses of the universe that were inaccessible to us before. Like the Hubble Space Telescope, the JWST is in space, so it can take pictures with stunning detail free from the distortions of Earth’s atmosphere.

However, while Hubble is in orbit around Earth at an altitude of 540km, the JWST is 1.5 million kilometres distant, far beyond the Moon. From this position, away from the interference of our planet’s reflected heat, it can collect light from across the universe far into the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

This ability, when combined with the JWST’s larger mirror, state-of-the-art detectors, and many other technological advances, allows astronomers to look back to the universe’s earliest epochs.

As the universe expands, it stretches the wavelength of light travelling towards us, making more distant objects appear redder. At great enough distances, the light from a galaxy is shifted entirely out of the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum to the infrared. The JWST is able to probe such sources of light right back to the earliest times, nearly 14 billion years ago.

The Hubble telescope continues to be a great scientific instrument and can see at optical wavelengths where the JWST cannot. But the Webb telescope can see much further into the infrared with greater sensitivity and sharpness.

Let’s have a look at ten images that have demonstrated the staggering power of this new window to the universe.

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