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NASA Will be Sending two More Missions to Mars in 2024, Costing Just $80 Million
One of the biggest ongoing changes in space exploration is the introduction of commercial methods into the field. Commercial launch providers like RocketLab and SpaceX have fundamentally changed the way the industry does business. Now researchers are taking their “ move fast and break things ” approach to another part of the industry – actual mission design. One of a trio of missions that will attempt to lower a mission’s cost to launch by a factor of 10 is led by researchers at UC Berkeley . Known as the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers ( ESCAPADE ), the mission will consist of twin satellites, known as “Blue” and “Gold” after UC Berkeley’s colors. Their primary mission will be to monitor Mars, watching for its atmosphere and how the planet is affected by the solar wind. One of the most intriguing things about the project is that it should cost only around $80 million from start to data collection in Mars orbit. Visualization of the focal points of ESCAPADE
One Year Out: NASA’s Psyche Mission Moves Closer to Launch
As part of NASA’s Discovery Program, the mission to explore a metal-rich asteroid is well on its way to an August 2022 launch. With NASA’s Psyche mission now less than a year from launch, anticipation is building. By next spring, the fully assembled spacecraft will ship from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a launch period that opens Aug. 1, 2022. In early 2026, the Psyche spacecraft will arrive at its target, an asteroid of the same name in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists believe asteroid Psyche, which is about 140 miles (226 kilometers) wide, is made largely of iron and nickel and could be the core of an early planet. The spacecraft will spend 21 months orbiting the asteroid and gathering science data with a magnetometer, a multispectral imager, and a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer. The information the instruments gather won’t just help scientists understand this particula
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