As 2011 draws to a close, the year ahead, 2012, promises to be a year when some greatly anticipated space missions are scheduled to take place. They can be divided into unmanned, commercial, and international.
Unmanned Missions for 2012
The twin NASA GRAIL probes will arrive in lunar orbit on New Year's Day for a three month mission to examine the moon's gravity, as well as its interior and formation. The two satellites will create a map of the moon's variable gravity field by measuring the changes in distance between them due to gravitational variations.
The Dawn spacecraft, currently in orbit around the asteroid Vesta, will complete that phase of its mission in July. It will blast out of orbit and head toward the largest known asteroid, Ceres, where it is due to arrive in Feb 2015.
Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity is scheduled to land on the Martian surface on August 6. The SUV sized Mars rover will touch down with that will use a crane to gentler lower it to the ground after having its descent slowed by retro rockets and a parachute. If it successfully touches down, it will provide the most sophisticated and extensive unmanned examination of Mars yet.
Commercial Missions for 2012
If all goes well, the first cargo version of SpaceX's Dragon will launch on Feb 7 on board a Falcon 9 rocket. A few days later the cargo Dragon will rendezvous with the International Space Station. The crew of the ISS will take hold of the Dragon with a remote manipulator arm and berth it to an airlock. If all is successful, a new era of commercial cargo space missions will have been born, presaging crewed flights scheduled to take place in 2017.
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo has so far been engaged in glide tests, after having been dropped by its carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo. It is hoped that powered flights of the SpaceShipTwo will commence sometime in 2012, bringing closer that era of paid passenger space flights to low Earth orbit.
International Space Missions for 2012
While NASA astronauts are compelled to pay for rides on the Russian Soyuz, due to the end of the space shuttle program, the Chinese space program will quicken its pace with two missions to its space station module prototype, the Tiangong-1. These missions will be the Shenzhou 9 and the Shenzhou 10. It is anticipated, pending an analysis of the unmanned mission of the Shenzhou 8, that one or both of these flights will carry a crew. That being the case, the crew of each mission will spend about two weeks docked to the Tiangong-1, according to Space Daily. One of the members of the Shenzhou 10 may well be China's first female astronaut.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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