Moon, Mars, and Asteroid Missions top 2022 Space Goals

Space science next year will be rocketed forward with missions to the Moon, Asteroid, Mars, and the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope coming online. The data sent back to Earth from these upcoming missions will help scientists learn more than ever before about objects in the solar system and far beyond it.

Space agencies like NASA, the European Space Agency, and Japan’s space agency, JAXA, aim to send probes to various targets around the solar system this year. The European Space Agency and Russia are planning to launch their joint ExoMars lander and rover to the surface of the Red Planet in September.

It will join NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on the Martian surface. Both are expected to continue their work next year. NASA’s Psyche mission is due to launch in August 2022 on a mission to explore a strange, metal-dominated Asteroid that may have once been part of the core of a long-dead planet.

NASA’s DART mission is also expected to arrive at its Asteroid target next year in the hopes of slamming into it and figuring out just what it would take to throw a dangerous space rock off of a collision course with Earth. NASA is expected to launch the first flight of its Space Launch System mega-rocket on a trip around the Moon, and the space agency plans to load it with scientific experiments.