Happy kinda-belated New Year!
Like we do every January, we figured we'd start off the year with a sneak peek at what
space missions you can expect to hear more about during 2017.
Some of these missions will expand what we know already, but others will venture into
uncharted territory.
Take Prospector-X, which will test technology for the first commercial asteroid prospecting mission.
Asteroids are rich in water and metals, which can be used to power spacecraft or for manufacturing.
But right now we don't have a way to access those resources.
So Deep Space Industries, an asteroid-mining company from California, is designing technology
to change that.
Prospector-X is due to launch to low-Earth orbit in September, and while it's there,
it'll test three key technologies for later asteroid mining missions.
First is the propulsion system, called Comet-1, which uses water as a propellant.
Prospector-X will also test the optical navigation system, which will use two cameras to determine
just how close the spacecraft is getting to its asteroid target.
And finally, it will test the deep space avionics: the electrical systems and computers used
on the mission.
If all goes well, the technology will be used on Prospector-1, the first commercial mission
to survey and land on an asteroid, which will launch sometime in the next few years.
A few months after the Prospector-X launch, in December of this year, NASA will launch
a new satellite to learn more about exoplanets.
It's called TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and it will search 200,000
of the brightest stars near the Sun to try to find planets around them.
It'll look for planets using the transit method, which involves searching for periodic
dips in a star's brightness — a key sign that there might be a planet passing in front of it.
Then, various telescopes back here on Earth will confirm that the objects really are exoplanets
and that TESS's observations were correct.
Those other telescopes will observe how the exoplanets' gravity affects their host stars,
which will help researchers determine the masses of these new planets and figure out
which ones they want to study more.
TESS is expected to find more than 2,000 new exoplanets, adding to the almost 3,500 we
already know about.
Other missions, like the Kepler space telescope, have looked at exoplanets before, but the
stars TESS studies will be 30 to 100 times brighter than what Kepler looked at, and it
will survey an area 400 times larger.
Studying exoplanets can teach us more about how the Earth formed and what conditions need
to be like for life to evolve, so we're about to learn a whole lot more about the universe.
And finally, China is going to the moon!
Since 2007, the China National Space Administration has been launching moon missions in the Chang'e
program, named after the Chinese moon goddess.
And Chang'e 5 is due to launch in the second half of 2017.
Chang'e 1 and 2 were both lunar orbiters, and Chang'e 3 was a lander that put the
Yutu rover on the moon in 2013.
Chang'e 4 is another lander-rover combination, but it actually won't launch until 2018,
after Chang'e 5.
Meanwhile, this year Chang'e 5 will land on the near side of the moon and will collect
and return lunar samples to Earth.
These will be first new samples brought back to Earth since 1976!
Studying samples of the moon's rocks and soil can teach us about how the early days
of the moon, the Earth, and the solar system as a whole.
If everything goes well for Chang'e 5, Chang'e 6 will launch in 2018 to return samples from
the far side of the moon.
That's never been done by any country, so it would provide brand-new information about
an unexplored part of the moon's surface.
And if Chang'e 5 doesn't go as planned, they might try landing Chang'e 6 on the
near side of the moon again instead of going around to the far side.
It mainly depends on the success of Chang'e 5!
All of this is building up to China's first crewed mission to the moon, which they hope
will happen by 2036.
That's a lot of missions!
The teams behind all these missions have been working hard for years, and it's finally
show time!
So it looks like this will be a year of new discoveries and you can be sure to learn more
about them here at SciShow Space.
Thanks for watching this episode and special thanks to our patrons on Patreon for helping
us make this happen.
If you'd like to help us keep making episodes like this you can go to patreon.com/scishow.
And don't forget to go to youtube.com/scishowspace and subscribe!
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