Which countries will send missions to the Moon in 2023 and other space projects
In 2023, Russia, India and the European Space Agency will launch missions to the Moon and deep space. This follows NASA's recent Artemis I mission, which orbited the Moon with the Orion spacecraft, which is intended to take humans to the Moon and Mars in the future. The BBC writes about this in its review of upcoming space launches.
India plans to launch the Chandrayaan 3 mission to the moon in June 2023, which will include a lander and a robotic rover for surface exploration. India first reached the Moon in 2008 with Chandrayaan 1.
Russia plans to launch its Luna 25 mission in July 2023, sending a probe to the Moon to collect samples from its south polar region.
SpaceX plans to take Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and eight other passengers on a trip "on the Moon" in late 2023. This will be the first mission of the 100-person Starship.
NASA, the US space agency, plans to launch its next mission to the Moon in 2024. Artemis II will take astronauts into orbit around the Moon. Artemis III plans to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon in 2025 or 2026 (the first woman and the first person of color - BBC).
This will be the first time humans have set foot on the moon since NASA's Apollo mission in 1972. Now the spacecraft Space X will be used for this.
China has announced plans with Russia to establish a joint base on the Moon by 2035.
The goal of space powers such as the US, Russia and China is to create bases on the Moon for astronauts to live in, says Dr. McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US.
“The Moon is used as a stepping stone to places like Mars,” he says. This is a great place to test deep space technologies.”
In addition, launching a spacecraft from the Moon requires less propellant than deep space flight from Earth.
And, he adds, a source of fuel has been discovered on the Moon. “It is known that there is water at the south pole of the Moon,” says Dr. King. "That can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used to refuel ships for travel to Mars and elsewhere."
This is one of the reasons why it is so desirable to return to the Moon - to claim the rights to water.
NASA will launch its Psyche spacecraft in the summer of 2023 to explore an asteroid called 16 Psyche, thought to be the remnant of a planet created in the early days of the solar system.
The European Space Agency, an organization supported by 22 European countries, plans to launch its Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer in April 2023. The probe will look for signs of life in the water ice, which is believed to lie below the surface of Jupiter's three moons - Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
China plans to launch the Xuntian telescope into low Earth orbit in December 2023 to map distant stars and black holes. He has already landed probes and robotic rovers on the Moon and Mars, and sent a research station called Tiangong into space.
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