BY BENJAMIN SUTHERLAND: FREELANCE CORRESPONDENT
THRILLING SPACE missions are scheduled for blast- off in 2021. To tweak the orbit of an asteroid’s moon that is nearly as big as a stadium, America’s NASA plans to launch a car-sized craft to smash into it the following year. Neither the asteroid, Didymos, nor its moon, Dimorphos, threatens Earth, but the collision should yield potentially handy “planetary defence” know-how. NASA also plans an uncrewed flight around the Moon, and, with help from the space agencies of Canada and Europe, the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the biggest and priciest ever. India may put three astronauts into orbit. India and Russia aim to launch lunar landers. And China will begin launching parts of its next and biggest space station, Tiangong-3.
It is ambitious stuff for all parties concerned. NASA’s asteroid spacecraft must eject an Italian Space Agency observation pod before hitting its target at a closing speed of 6.6km a second. Unfolding the nearly $10bn space telescope’s mirror and tennis-court-sized sunshield will require weeks of intricate robotic origami at -230°C. India has never attempted crewed space flight. Its previous lunar lander crashed. Russia must develop new systems for difficult ballistic navigation to an unvisited region near the Moon’s south pole, says Lev Zelenyi of the government’s Space Research Institute in Moscow. China hopes to complete its space station with a blitz of a dozen launches over two years.
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