cool space exploration shit over the next few years that ISN'T elon musk related: a thread

May 17, 2021: First Mars landing by the Chinese space program (CNSA), with the Zhurong rover as part of Tianwen-1

10 June, 2021: Launch of Shenzhou 12 by the CNSA, docking with the Tianhe craft and inaugurating manned occupation of the Tiangong modular space station, CNSA's first

16 October 2021: Launch of Lucy, a NASA probe being sent on a 12 year mission to explore the Jupiter Trojans, a group of asteroids which follow Jupiter's orbit around the sun.

31 Oct. 2021: Launch of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope after *holy shit* 14 years of launch delays!!!! this thing has been in development since the 90s and is the size of a HOUSE

21st October 2021: Roscosmos (Russia's space agency) restarts the Luna programme 45 years after its last launch (Luna 24 in 1976) with Luna 25, aiming for the Lunar south pole. Quite the retro throw-back to say the least.

November 4th, 2021: Launch of Artemis 1 via the Space Launch System, an unmanned lunar orbiter designed to safely test the Orion capsule in preparation for Artemis 2 & 3.

This thing is hitchhiked by a FUCKTON of cubesats, which i'm going to go over in detail:

(A CubeSat, for those unaware, is a tiny little satellite that comes in racks of 1-12 little cubes, hence the name. They're about the size of a desktop computer.)

1st of the Artemis Cubesats: ArgoMoon, by the Italian Space Agency of all people. It's basically a floating camera the size of a shoebox that will document the whole cubesat dispersal process and take data to make sure nothing is being fucked up. Helpful, but boring.

2nd - BioSentinel, by NASA! It's basically just using the moon ride to jump to a heliocentric orbit with a bunch of yeast, and seeing what happens to the yeast out there.

Exciting for anyone wondering if you can make sourdough while in interplanetary space.

3rd - CuSP (Cubesat for Solar Particles), by the Southwest Research Institute. Its gonna study solar particles in a heliocentric orbit, wtf else you expect

4th - EQUULEUS by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA). Its going to study the plasmasphere and perform thrust manuver tests,, which i guess might be interesting to some people??

This is overshadowed by JAXA's *other* Artemis stowaway..

5th - OMOTENASHI. A JAXA *Moon Lander Cubesat*.

Yeah! They're putting a fucking MOON LANDER on a CUBESAT. How the fuck they minituarized it that much i do not know: this thing is only *30 pounds*!

6th & 7th - Lunar IceCube and Lunar Flashlight

These little NASA boys are gonna scan the Moon for water ice. NASA unfortunately rejected my proposal for an accompanying mission, the Lunar Fleshlight

8 - Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper

I want your best guess about what this is going to do

9 - Near-Earth Asteroid Scout.

As the name suggests, this NASA probe is going to scout for near-Earth asteroids and try to get good looks at them. The main cool thing about this one is the GIANT fucking solar sail it comes with: 85 square meters!

10 - LunIR Skyfire, by some random silicon valley space startup called Tyvak. Its just going to do thermal and spectroscopic imaging on the moon. boring...

11 - Cislunar Explorers, by Cornell

Haha! This is actually one satellite that breaks into two! Clever way to get more bang for your buck, I guess.

They're going to do electrolysis of water and see if thats a good way to propel a satellite. Can't wait for Translunar Explorers.

12 - Earth Escape Explorer, by University of Colorado Boulder

This is basically just a shoebox-sized radio station a college is throwing in orbit around the sun so they can test long distance communication. exciting!

13 - Team Miles, by some tiny startup called Fluid and Reason LLC.

Its.. a plasma thruster tech demo they're putting in heliocentric orbit. Exciting.

Late 2021 (?) - Peregrine Mission One

ok we're FINALLY done with the artemis 1 cubesats - but we're not done with random commercial payloads to the moon! Cause NASA is also ferrying this commercial lander by Astrobotic - which itself is ferrying a *lot* of random shit

First off they're sending *six* rovers - all incredibly tiny. The first two are done by universities - Carnegie Mellon University's Iris CubeRover and UNAM (Mexico)'s tiny, tiny, Colmena rover.

Then 4 private rovers - these include SpaceBit (A UK company)'s Asagumo spider rover, Dymon (Japan)'s twin-ball rover Yaoki, and the INCREDIBLELY weird looking Hungarian "Team Puli " rover by Puli Space Technologies.

but see heres where it gets weird - the 6th rover slot was given to the Uni rover by Team AngelicvM, a Chilean startup. But I can find *no* trace of Team AngelicvM on the internet past 2016; their twitter & facebook have gone quiet, their website redirects to some Japanese site..

does Team AngelicvM still *exist*? all recent mentions of it are in the context of listing the other, active projects on this Peregrine mission. But just.. radio science from this Chilean startup. If anyone has more info this, I'd be very happy to hear.

oh btw also with this mission will be a large box that contains a bunch of time capsules and hard drives, including one by youtuber MrBeast.

Hey, when you got the cost down to 1.2 million per kg to ship shit to moon, I guess you can send anything.

Oh forgot this earlier: we got the 1st crewed flight on July 20th of the New Shepard, Jeff Bezo's suborbital dildo.

24 November, 2021: Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)

finally, to finish off the year, we got DART which is going to crash really fast into two asteroids orbiting around each other and see what happens

ok thats all for now. anprim space enthusiast signing off