About a month after the new year has started on Earth, three spacecraft will pull into the vicinity of Mars. What follows is a preview of some of 2021’s most expected events. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, effectively a successor to Hubble telescope. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launching in July, aims to test whether a spacecraft could deflect a future asteroid that was headed towards Earth surface. A second mission, Lucy, will be launched in October and travel much farther, making flybys through Jupiter’s orbital path. The United Arab Emirates, China and the United States all launched robotic missions to Mars last summer. The three spacecrafts will join a bustling community of explorers either in orbit or on the planet’s surface. The Emirati Hope orbiter’s mission will study the Martian atmosphere. China’s Tianwen-1 mission is to arrive at Mars on Feb. 10. It will send a lander containing a rover to the surface in May. NASA’s Perseverance rover will arrive on Feb 18 and plunge towards the surface of Mars. The rover will seek signs of extinct life in a dried out crater and riverbed. NASA also has its eye on returning astronauts to the moon this decade. Human spaceflight was transformed in 2020 as SpaceX successfully launched a pair of crews to the space station. The company is likely to send more astronauts to orbit in 2021. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin may send paying customers on short trips to the edge of space and back in 2021.
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