Race for the Moon and Starship tests mark 2023 – 12/30/2023 – Science

An intense race for the Moon and a season dedicated to asteroids marked the year 2023 in space exploration. Among all the countries and companies that participated in these endeavors, India in particular gained unprecedented respect by carrying out the first landing in the region close to the coveted lunar south pole.

It certainly won’t be the last. The area is coveted by Americans and Chinese for its natural resources —in particular water ice located at the bottom of craters where sunlight never hits, in addition to molecules impregnated in the soil itself—, and both are planning manned missions for the second half of this decade. until then. But the first one to go down there was India, with the Chandrayaan-3 mission. The landing, broadcast live, enchanted the world on August 23, definitively placing the Indians on the list of space powers.

The result contrasted with two other landing attempts carried out this year, one in April, by the Japanese company ispace, and another in August, by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

The first could have made Japan the fourth country to land on the Moon (after Russia, the USA and China), and the second could have brought a little prestige to the pioneers of space flight, who today have a program that deteriorates every year. .

Both failed, remembering that carrying out a successful landing, especially remotely, remains a great challenge.

This, however, will not dissuade countries and companies from continuing to pursue the lunar route.

A new Japanese probe, Slim, this time developed by its own space agency, is already on its way to the Moon, and should carry out a precision landing attempt on January 19. It pulls a line of trailers hired by NASA to take payloads to the surface of the Moon. Next year will be busy in those parts.

THE BIGGEST ROCKET IN HISTORY

Pertaining to lunar exploration, the world had the opportunity this year to see not one, but two flights of the largest rocket ever built in history. Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship vehicle was chosen by NASA to take crews to the surface of the Moon, but there is still a long way to go before it can do this.

It is, in practice, the second year in a row that we have seen the most powerful rocket in the world in action. In 2022, the holder of the brand was NASA’s SLS, also being used in manned lunar missions. It was slightly less capable than the Saturn V, used by the agency to take humans to the Moon in the last century, and is being built at a snail’s pace – the next flight, only in 2024, if it doesn’t rain. The Starship is more capable than the Saturn V, aims to be reusable, can be refueled in space and is manufactured at high speed. So much so that two have already flown and a third is already being prepared, with parts for the next ones well advanced.

It is part of SpaceX’s revolutionary philosophy, based on rapid innovation and continuous in-flight testing. Not surprisingly, the first two launches were not entirely successful, in contrast to the SLS mission, which went perfectly.

In the first flight, in April, the rocket did not leave the atmosphere and, after the failure of multiple engines, it was not even able to separate the second stage.

In the second, in November, the engines worked perfectly, the launch platform, in Boca Chica, Texas, remained intact, and the activation of the second stage went as planned, taking the vehicle into space – but it ended up being lost shortly after. after that, even before reaching its final speed for a “near-orbital” insertion, planned for the flight.

Let no one underestimate these results. This is how SpaceX learns, and the company has already demonstrated that it is ahead of essentially everyone else with this mindset.

In 2023, the company approached one hundred orbital launches — that’s one rocket every four days, on average — and launched around 80% of all the mass taken into space worldwide. That’s right, it alone launches much more than the rest of the world. With Starship, the tendency is for this to become even more accentuated – and prices are expected to fall.

What this will mean for the future of space exploration is not yet clear. But we can already tell that we will have a lot more of her in the coming years.

ASTRONOMY AND PLANETARY SCIENCE

The year was one of awestruck contemplation for astronomers who were able to work with the first results from the James Webb telescope, which began operations in 2022.

It’s still early days, but even so, the new equipment from NASA, ESA and CSA (American, European and Canadian agencies) has already brought great results, such as analyzes of the innermost exoplanets in the Trappist-1 system — the preferred target for the search for worlds habitable, as it has three worlds at a suitable distance from the star to preserve water—and the discovery of already well-developed galaxies in the far reaches of the cosmos, which reflect the infancy of the Universe.

The Trappist-1 b and c worlds were shown to have no appreciable atmosphere, which begins to answer astronomers’ doubts about whether planets around red dwarfs, smaller stars, cooler and more active than the Sun, can have them – an essential condition so that the planet is similar to Earth. But there are still five worlds to be studied there, precisely the most interesting ones, and the jury has not yet returned its verdict. It will last for years to come.

The study of distant galaxies is revolutionizing our understanding of the evolution of the Universe since the beginning of its expansion, 13.8 billion years ago. It is beginning to become clear that the formation of structures such as stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters began very early, perhaps as early as 300 million years after the Big Bang, and unfolded very quickly – perhaps too quickly to be explained by our cosmological model. more accepted. The future promises.

And to truly understand the Universe, we still need to discover what 95% of everything in it is made of — two mysterious entities that astronomers call dark matter and dark energy. They know they exist, but they don’t know what they are.

A new mission launched in July this year by ESA, Euclid, promises to bring answers. After a somewhat shaky start, engineers managed to get the space telescope up and running and it is already working to build a vast 3D map of the Universe. The idea is to accurately map the effects of dark matter and energy, in order to elucidate their nature.

Finally, we also had important advances in the exploration of the Solar System beyond the Moon. ESA launched its first mission to Jupiter, Juice, and NASA dispatched the Psyche probe, which is expected to visit a large metallic asteroid called Psyche, in the belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The American space agency, by the way, celebrated what it called the “autumn of asteroids”. In a space of three months (between September and November, autumn in the northern hemisphere, spring in the south), she completed the Osiris-Rex mission, bringing samples from the asteroid Bennu, launched the aforementioned Psyche and carried out the first flyby of an asteroid with the Lucy probe, which is on its way to orbit Jupiter, where it will study several of these bodies that accompany the giant planet on its journey around the Sun, a population known as Trojans.

It’s a lot of news, and that’s not to mention all the interplanetary missions from various countries that continue to operate in all corners of our system. We are little by little getting to know and occupying our backyard in the Milky Way, and 2023 was an important year on this path towards the future. More will come.