WHAT’S THE STORY?

AS we enter the 2020s, it looks more and more like being the Decade of Space. People going back to the Moon and preparing for the great leap to Mars, huge improvements in satellite technology, even space tourism by “ordinary” citizens – all of these are planned for a decade which will see space become the new frontier.

WHICH COUNTRIES ARE INVOLVED?

PLENTY. The two giants of space exploration so far have been the US and Russia, but now China and India have plans to rival them and in 2020 alone, there are a host of countries queuing up to get into space, mostly with satellites – Ukraine, Canada, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Brazil, Vietnam, Italy, France, Germany, Kazakhstan and Canada are all planning satellite missions.

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India’s plans are set to see the world’s most populous democracy become the fourth nation after Russia (as predecessor state the USSR), the US and China to have a human spaceflight programme – their spacecraft Gaganyaan is currently under construction and is set to take three Indians into space in December, 2021. Its long-term aim is to start a space station and perhaps even a lunar landing.

ARE PEOPLE REALLY GOING TO THE MOON AND MARS?

MARS might take a bit longer, but this decade will definitely see men and women on the Moon.

As The National has reported, America’s space agency Nasa has Project Artemis already up and running.

Here’s what Nasa says: “Nasa is committed to landing American astronauts, including the first woman and the next man, on the Moon by 2024. Through the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program, we will use innovative new technologies and systems to explore more of the Moon than ever before.

“We will collaborate with our commercial and international partners to establish sustainable missions by 2028.”

WHAT WILL BE THE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DECADE?

ONE of them is coming up as soon as February. The Solar Orbiter mission will teach us more than we have ever known about the Sun, our very own star.

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An international cooperative mission between European Space Agency and Nasa, the Solar Orbiter will address many questions concerning the Sun. The spacecraft will launch on an Atlas V 411 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral on February 5. The £300 million Orbiter was built by a consortium originally led by Astrium UK which is now part of the European Airbus group. The plan is for the Orbiter to make a close approach to the Sun every five months for the next few years and take measurements of solar wind and particles from the star itself.

Also this year, Nasa will launch the Mars Rover expedition while Elon Musk’s SpaceX company plans to launch its Starship rocket, though there was a setback last month when the prototype was damaged during tests.

A mission to explore Jupiter and its moons is scheduled by the European Space Agency for 2022, the year in which Japan intended to land an uncrewed lunar lander on the Moon. In 2023, Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa plans to become the first commercial passenger to fly by the Moon aboard a Starship – private companies are going to be the biggest boom sector in space this decade.

More and more satellites will also be launched into space – around 1000 more satellites for everything from communications to Earth climate observation are planned for next year alone.

Space tourism is also certain to start, possibly even next year.

ANYTHING WE SHOULD WORRY ABOUT?

THERE is an infinitesimally small possibility of an asteroid or comet hitting the Earth but we will know a lot more about that when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returns from its mission in September 2023.

OSIRIS-REx is currently in the vicinity of an asteroid called Bennu, and is surveying the surface of the asteroid to find a suitable place to attempt to approach the asteroid and take a sample of its surface.

Bennu is known to have carbonaceous material and it is the same age as the solar system. Scientists hope that by examining the samples taken from Bennu they will be able to say if passing asteroids and comets helped start life on Earth.

WHAT ABOUT HERE ON EARTH?

THERE is already under way a very exciting development in telescopy. When it starts work in 2024-25, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Chile will be the largest optical/near-infrared telescope in the world and will gather 13 times more light than the largest optical telescopes existing today.

The ELT will gather images 16 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope. Being built by the 16-nation European Southern Observatory, the ELT will “vastly advance astrophysical knowledge by enabling detailed studies of planets around other stars, the first galaxies in the Universe, super-massive black holes, and the nature of the Universe’s dark sector,” as the Observatory said.