I think we’re all ready for 2021, aren’t we?
Well, as always there will be a lot of fun astronomy and space exploration events in the upcoming year, and I hope I can get you excited about those to come and maybe help you forget all the nonsense of 2020, just a little bit.
Some of these events have to do with well-known topics, but others not so much. Preparing this list helped me set my mental calendar but also showed me several things I didn’t know...
So here we go, in chronological order. Order of importance? That’s up to you!
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January 15 — NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative launches ELaNa 20. This mission will put 9 CubeSats into orbit, courtesy of a Virgin Orbit LauncherOne vehicle from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. CubeSats are just what they sound like: little cubic modules the size of 1-liter bottles that collect data and send it back to Earth. Typical CubeSats are made up of 1 to 3 of these modules.
A typical CubeSat. The measuring tape sticking out of it will be its antenna
To date, 46 CubeSats, designed by students and small companies that couldn’t launch their own satellites any other way, have gone up. A definite mixed bag of successes and failures, but that’s how you learn. Among the successful ones that have sent back real and useful data:
The Quetzal-1 crew in Guatemala (top), who are using their satellite for Earth imaging and engineering education, and the ZACube-2 squad in South Africa, who are busy tracking seafaring vessels and the coloration of the oceans:
Two groups enjoying active telemetry with their CubeSats (pre-COVID pix, of course!)
How fun must it be to see your own satellite get up into space, and to start receiving telemetry? Man, I love this program!
You can see a nice summary of the nine CubeSats that will go into orbit on ELaNa 20 right here. My favorite in this batch is Q-PACE, designed by students at the University of Central Florida, which is going to contain lots of small particles and watch how they interact at zero gravity. That’s too complex to simulate even with a powerful computer, so it’s best to just do the real experiment. Its walls can vibrate at different speeds and impart different velocities to these little particles. Cameras will film the interactions and send the data back, and that’s going to help us understand how planets formed from intergalactic dust. That ain’t bad for a shoebox!
February 18 — Perseverance lands on Mars. This is most assuredly the Big Dog of the whole year. When the time comes, there’ll be plenty of coverage of this event (which is on my son’s birthday, and he is liking that), so I won’t try to rehash all of it here.
Now, as I recall, AKALib summed this mission up very nicely with a diary back around the launch date. Ah, yes … here it is. I promise you there will be loads of fun around this mission on landing day and thereafter. By then, too, we’ll feel so much better with President Biden, and maybe even V.P. Harris as the tiebreaker in the Senate.
June 10: Annular eclipse of the Sun, U.S. East Coast. Here is the path of the Moon’s shadow:
Red dot is totality
If you live in the Northeastern United States, the Sun will rise about 80% eclipsed by the Moon on this day. New York City sunrise will be 5:25 A.M. You can get a more-detailed look here:
If you can roll out of bed, you get a decent shot at this from Maine down to around Pittsburgh. This is an annular eclipse, where the Moon is a little too far away from Earth to cover the Sun entirely.
One unusual aspect of this eclipse is that totality goes straight over the North Pole.
July 22: NASA launches the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The objective here is to practice nudging a near-Earth asteroid to see how well we can change its orbit. The practice asteroid will be 65803 Didymos, whose orbit gets rather close to Earth’s:
The positions of asteroid 65803 Didymos and the inner planets, Dec. 30, 2020. Didymos’ orbit skims that of Earth
Didymos is about half a mile across, and it has a moonlet called Dimorphos that is only about 500 feet across. We’ll strike Dimorphos with the DART spacecraft, and just before that we’ll release — you guessed it — a CubeSat called LICIACube to image the whole event:
DART’s mission schematic
The objective is to knock Dimorphos into a shallower orbit of Didymos (in blue above) and see how well our calculations of the impact’s … well, impact on the orbit hold up. It might seem simple to calculate this, but an asteroid isn’t exactly a billiard ball! It has a certain resilience, and an impact will knock pieces of it loose, affecting the overall momentum change. Here’s an example of a model simulation of what will happen when DART strikes Dimorphos:
In this simulation for the DART mission, a 400-kilogram impactor has hit Didymos’s moonlet at 6 kilometers per second. Here, the innermost 13 meters of ejecta from the impact point are modeled, with the grayscale cutout indicating accumulated strain inside the asteroid (below escape speed) and colors denoting velocities exceeding the 5-centimeter-per-second escape speed.
DART will be followed up in 2023 by the ESA’s Hera mission, which will visit the Didymos-Dimorphos system and take measurements on its characteristics and have a close look at the impact, completing our ability to understand what happened and to help plan future nudges of threatening near-Earth objects.
October 16 - NASA launches Lucy, the first-ever mission to visit the Trojan asteroids, a special group that share Jupiter’s orbit:
Trojan asteroids are in green. They are not nearly to scale; Jupiter, of course, is immensely larger than any of them
They range from the largest, 624 Hektor, at about 250 miles across, down to small chunks. We have specifically identified about 7,000 of them, but there could be about a million that are at least half a mile across. Most asteroids orbit between Mars and Jupiter, but Jupiter possibly yanked some of these Trojans back into its orbit as it drifted farther away from the Sun during the formation of the Solar System. Some people think the majority of them, though, may have formed in the outer Solar System, never joining any of the forming planets. One other weird wrinkle is that a lot of them have tilted orbits with respect to Jupiter.
Lucy will visit seven of these Trojan asteroids over a period of twelve years, and we’ll get great images, as we did of Pluto and of Ultima Thule (now Arrokoth) with New Horizons. That’s fun enough right there.
But why, scientifically, do we want to visit these asteroids in particular? Well, if we can check out the composition of a number of them, it will tell us a lot about where they formed. We actually don’t know a whole lot about the interiors of the outer planets because they’re hidden under huge balls of gas, but the Trojans ought to give us some good clues about that. The Trojans also seem from observations on the ground to be not only pretty diverse, but rich in carbon compounds and water, which sounds pretty life-friendly; maybe Earth borrowed some of this material to get life going?
October 31: NASA (finally!) launches the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). If Perseverance is the Big Dog of 2021, then this is the Big Cat. The JWST will be the largest-ever space telescope, with even greater capabilities than the Hubble.
The Hubble’s mirror is the silver circle; the JWST’s is the gold honeycomb
Just this month, the JWST completed its final folding and unfolding tests, which are really critical because the entire thing has to fold up to fit into the head of an Ariane 5 rocket:
There’s really extensive coverage of the JWST out there, especially because of all the delays it has encountered in its launch, so I won’t try to capture all of that here. But because of all the struggles, this should be one of the more nail-biting launches and deployments we’ve seen in a while.
November: Don’t have a hard date yet, but the plan is for NASA to launch Artemis 1 sometime this month. This is the first mission leading up to putting people back on the Moon in 2024. There’s a nice map of the mission here, but I’m not attempting to show it because it’s too tiny and detailed. The main point of Artemis 1 is to test the new SLS rocket, the most powerful ever built, with no crew yet. NASA wants this to be the propulsion system to take humans to Mars and possibly even farther. The SLS hasn’t really been tested yet, so who knows how this will go?
Artemis 1 on mobile launcher (artist’s concept)
December 4: Yes, we will have a total solar eclipse in 2021! It’s just that you’ll only be able to see it from Antarctica:
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I’m sure I’ll be scolded for leaving something out, because there are lots more things coming in 2021, such as Vera C. Rubin Observatory seeing first light or the total lunar eclipse on May 26.
But I’ve tried to pick out some gems, and I hope that gives you a lot to look forward to in 2021.
As we finally bring one of the most difficult years in recent memory to a close, I sincerely wish all of you a happy, healthy, and safe New Year! It’s going to get better, I promise! We will Build Back Better on the other side...
