Space Science in 2026: New lunar explorers, Mars missions, and space telescopes

Date:
Sun, 18 Jan 2026 20:46:57 +0000

Description:
With many missions on the manifest, the new year promises to be packed with space The post Space Science in 2026: New lunar explorers, Mars missions, and space telescopes appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com .

FULL STORY ======================================================================

With many missions on the manifest, the new year promises to be packed with space science. Two interplanetary spacecraft will arrive at their
destinations as another Mars window opens in late 2026. Meanwhile, multiple space telescopes have their launch dates set for this year, and the schedule promises an increased cadence for lunar missions.

The year follows another busy year in space science, which saw multiple space telescopes launched and the first fully successful commercial lunar mission. In 2025, NASA announced the discovery of ingredients for life in ancient asteroid material, while scientists studied potential traces of ancient life on Mars. Multiple missions ended last year, and 2025 left one of NASAs Mars explorers in peril.



More lunar missions to launch following 2025 successes and failures

With lunar exploration on the rise globally, 2026 is set to see an increase
in lunar missions. In the first few months of 2025, three commercial landers attempted to touch down on the Moon, but only one of them successfully
landed. Two of last years missions will see follow-up attempts in the coming year, which also has three additional lunar missions on the schedule.

Early in 2025, two lunar landers shared a ride atop SpaceXs Falcon 9. Launching on Jan. 15, Firefly Aerospaces Blue Ghost lander and ispaces Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander Resilience started their missions.



Resilience took a slow but energy-efficient trajectory and arrived at the
Moon for a landing attempt on June 5. Roughly 90 seconds before touchdown, ispace lost communications with the lander, which subsequently crashed into the lunar surface. In its investigation, the company traced the anomaly to
the deteriorated performance of the spacecrafts Laser Range Finder.

Meanwhile, Blue Ghost arrived at the Moon on March 2, when it touched down successfully near Mons Latreille in Mare Crisium at the start of the lunar day. The landing marked the first fully successful lunar landing of a commercial vehicle. Blue Ghost operated its 10 science and technology
payloads on the lunar surface until it shut down five hours into the lunar night on March 17.

Firefly plans to follow up on this successful mission in 2026 with Blue Ghost Mission 2. Set to launch no earlier than (NET) November atop a Falcon 9, the lander will carry five payloads to the lunar surface. Among the payloads are NASAs Lunar Surface Electromagnetic Experiment at Night (LuSEE-Night), which will operate through the night and is set to become the first operational radio telescope on the Moon, and the United Arab Emirates Rashid Rover 2.

Blue Ghost mission 2 will also debut Fireflys Elytra Dark space tug, which will not only boost Blue Ghost to the Moon, but also insert the European
Space Agencys (ESA) Lunar Pathfinder communications relay satellite into
lunar orbit. Lunar Pathfinder and Elytra Dark will team up to provide communications for Blue Ghost after its landing.



As Blue Ghost Mission 1 and Hakuto-R Resilience were making their way to the Moon in early 2025, Falcon 9 launched another mission destined for our celestial companion. The Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander Athena launched on Feb. 27, 2025, for the companys IM-2 mission. The spacecraft attempted a touchdown near the lunar south pole on March 6. Although Athena touched down softly, it fell over after landing like its predecessor on the IM-1 mission.

Athenas unintended orientation prevented its solar panels from generating power, which cut the mission short. Regardless, mission controllers were able to operate NASAs Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1) for a
short period.

Intuitive Machines plans to attempt its third Nova C mission in 2026, with IM-3 launching on a Falcon 9 in the second half of the year. The lander will carry payloads for NASA, ESA, and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), among others.

This year, Blue Origin will also attempt its first lunar landing with its
Blue Moon Mark 1 craft. The uncrewed version of the companys Blue Moon lunar lander will launch atop a New Glenn as a pathfinder to test the BE-7 engine and various mission-critical systems. In 2025, NASA announced that its cancelled and later revived Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) would fly as a payload on Mark 1s second mission. Artists impression of Astrolabs FLIP rover disembark ing Astrobotics Griffin lander. (Credit: Astrolab/Astrobotic)

Before its cancellation, VIPER was set to fly on the first mission of Astrobotics Griffin lander, which is now scheduled for July 2026. Instead of VIPER, the lander will carry Astrolabs FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) rover. FLIP is a prototype for Astrolabs FLEX rover, which the company has pitched for NASAs Artemis program.

China is planning to launch its Change 7 mission this year and attempt a landing on the rim of Shackleton crater near the lunar south pole. The
mission consists of an orbiter and a lander, both outfitted with payloads
from international partners. The lander will also carry a rover and a small hopping probe.

New missions to head for Mars as existing missions hit milestones and experience issues

Robotic explorers have continued studying Mars, both from orbit and the planets surface. One of NASAs Martian satellites suffered an issue near the end of the year. Meanwhile, two more missions are set to head for the red planet during the 2026 transfer window.

On Nov. 13, 2025, NASAs twin ESCAPADE satellites launched on Blue Origins second New Glenn mission. The rocket delivered the spacecraft on a course to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, where they will await the opening of the Mars transfer window in November. After they arrive at Mars, the two satellites, named Blue and Gold , will study how the solar wind has been stripping away the Martian atmosphere over time.



A second mission destined for Mars will launch during the transfer window
near the end of the year. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agencys (JAXA) Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission will observe Phobos and Deimos. Whats more, the spacecraft will attempt to collect a sample from Phobos surface and deliver it to Earth by 2031. See Also Planetary science thread Space science section NSF store Click here to join L2

Meanwhile, NASA has been diagnosing a problem with its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) satellite. In early December, the agency lost contact with the satellite when it failed to phone home after reappearing
into view from Earth following an orbital pass behind the red planet. A small fragment of telemetry received after the incident started suggests the spacecraft was rotating and its orbit might have changed.

NASA engineers had to pause the recovery effort in late December due to the Mars solar conjunction. During this event, the planet disappears behind the Sun from Earths perspective, which inhibits communication with any Martian spacecraft. The agency plans to try to recontact MAVEN after the Mars solar conjunction ends on Jan. 16.

Down on the planets surface, NASAs Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have continued roaming around and performing science.

Last year, the scientific community continued research into the Cheyava Falls rock, found on a rocky outcrop on the edge of an ancient river valley. Perseverance encountered and studied the rock in July 2024, and scientists have since tried to understand the possible mechanisms behind the rocks distinct leopard spots. A 2025 study concluded that excretion by microbial life is the most likely explanation for the pattern. Although more research
is needed, the study strengthened the findings position as a potential biosignature.



In 2025, Perseverance surpassed Curiosity in terms of distance traveled on
the Red Planets surface, logging a total of 39.96 km by the end of the year, whereas Curiosity had amassed 36.16 km since its landing in 2012. If Perseverance continues traveling at this rate, the rover will likely break Opportunitys all-time extraterrestrial driving distance record of 45.16 km sometime in 2026.

Exploration continues across the Solar System

Throughout the rest of the Solar System, 2025 was dominated by asteroid-related discoveries.

At the start of the year, the astronomical community tracked asteroid 2024 YR4, following its discovery on Dec 27, 2024. Initial observations of 2024
YR4 suggested a small chance of the asteroid impacting Earth on Dec 22, 2032, but subsequent observations refined the predictions and ruled out a collision with our planet. NASA has since determined the asteroid poses no danger to Earth in 2032 and beyond, although the asteroid still has a small, 3.8%, chance of impacting the Moon in 2032.

Later in the year, observatories throughout the solar system focused on another object, the third interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS. Discovered on July 1 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), the first interstellar comet came closest to the Sun on Oct. 29, passing at a distance of 1.36 astronomical units (AU) 1.36 times the distance between Earth and
the Sun. As the object found its way through the Solar System, the astronomical community used many instruments to study it, including Perseverances Mastcam-Z camera.



NASA bookended 2025 by announcing essential building blocks of life had been found in samples returned from asteroid Bennu. The first study, published in late January 2025, found essential building blocks of life, including all
five nucleobases and 14 of the 20 amino acids used by life on Earth, in a small part of the sample returned by NASAs OSIRIS-REx mission in 2023. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) sampled Bennu in 2020 and collected more than double
the amount of material than planned.

In early December, an additional study led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan found the bio-essential sugars ribose and glucose in the asteroid material, meaning all materials required to form RNA are present in Bennus samples. Although no traces of life have been identified in the samples, the discovery implies that the early Solar System could have supported a hypothesized RNA-based precursor to life.

On April 20, 2025, NASAs Lucy mission flew by asteroid Donaldjohanson in the asteroid belts inner regions, while on its way to study Jupiters Trojan asteroids. The flyby provided the first-ever close-up views of the asteroid, taken with Lucys high-resolution Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LLORRI). The new images revealed Donaldjohanson is a contact binary made up of two touching bodies.

Asteroid exploration continues in 2026 with the arrival of ESAs Hera mission at Didymos and its companion Dimorphos. Hera will study the binary system and the impact left after NASAs Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission intentionally collided with Dimorphos in 2022. Hera flew by Mars in March
2025 to change its trajectory, allowing the teams to test the spacecrafts instruments on the red planet. Artist Impression of Heras mission at Dimorphos. (Credit: ESA)

In October, ESA announced that the spacecrafts good performance allowed the mission team to design more aggressive maneuvers. This will allow Hera to arrive a month before schedule, in November 2026.

Another ESA mission is set to arrive at its destination that same month. On Nov. 6, the joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission will enter orbit around
Mercury after an eight-year journey. The route to the Solar Systems innermost planet involved six Mercury flybys and was delayed by a year following a
power glitch in 2024.

Once at its destination, BepiColombo will deploy ESAs Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXAs Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, which will start their science operations in early 2027.

Moving closer to the Sun than any spacecraft, NASAs Parker Solar Probe performed the final perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun, of its
nominal mission on June 19, 2025. Although the spacecraft has performed two more solar encounters since, on Sept. 16 and Dec. 13, NASA has yet to decide on a possible mission extension. Solar Orbiters image of the Suns south pole. (Credit: ESA/NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/D. Berghmans (ROB))

The European Space Agencys Solar Orbiter became the first spacecraft to image the Suns poles in 2025. During a Venus flyby in February, the spacecraft changed its orbit to leave the ecliptic plane for the first time, allowing a view of the Suns poles. In the coming years, the spacecraft will further increase the inclination of its orbit, starting with another Venus flyby on Dec. 24, 2026, which will raise it from 17 degrees to 24 degrees.

Solar Orbiter didnt study Venus during its February flyby, but 2025 did see the release of a study of the Venusian atmosphere. A Japanese team of scientists used data from Japans Himawari 8 and Himawari 9 weather satellites to study our planetary neighbor. The satellites occasionally observe Venus when its seen near Earths rim. Analyzing these observations, the team demonstrated that weather satellites can be used to fill in data between dedicated missions to Venus.

New space telescopes come online

Three new space-based observatories were launched in 2025, while other telescopes continued to make observations and reveal the secrets of our universe. However, the year also spelled the end for a storied observatory.

On Jan. 15, the European Space Agencys (ESA) Gaia observatory officially ceased science operations, with final contact and spacecraft deactivation occurring on March 27. Gaia launched to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 in December 2013, where it performed astrometry and curated the largest three-dimensional catalog of space objects. Processing of Gaias data is ongoing, with the final catalog estimated to contain over one billion cosmic objects. SPHERExs first map, as seen through infrared light emitted by dust and hot gas. Dust appears red, while hot gas appears blue. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASAs Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) near-infrared observatory launched on a Falcon 9 in March, with the four Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) satellites launching to Sun-synchronous orbit alongside SPHEREx.

SPHEREx finished commissioning in April and completed its first of four all-sky maps in December, observing the sky at 102 unique near-infrared wavelengths. Analyses of the map will inform scientists about the universes rapid inflation in the immediate moments after the Big Bang, as well as the distribution of organic molecules throughout the universe. Meanwhile, the
four PUNCH satellites began observing the Sun during the summer of 2025, making three-dimensional measurements of the Suns inner heliosphere. These observations will allow scientists to study the origins of solar wind.

Another NASA observatory launched atop a Falcon 9 in September: the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). IMAP is a heliophysics mission that will investigate the heliosphere, the vast bubble around our solar system that is created from the Suns wind. After arriving at the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1 (L1), IMAP and its suite of 10 instruments successfully recorded their first measurements on Dec. 16, with preliminary science data collection beginning soon after.

Throughout the year, the existing fleet of space telescopes facilitated discoveries across the universe. In January, scientists combined the power of the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study a protoplanetary disk in extreme detail. Later in the year, Webb discovered a rapidly growing, supermassive black hole in one of the farthest galaxies ever observed. Meanwhile, scientists used Hubble to investigate a Pluto-like object falling into a white dwarf 260 light-years from Earth. Collage of galaxies in different shapes selected from Euclids Q1 release by Zoobot. (Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by M. Walmsley, M. Huertas-Company, J.-C. Cuillandre)

Quick Data Release 1 (Q1) from ESAs Euclid wide-angle telescope, which launched in July 2023 atop a Falcon 9, was released on March 19. Providing data on three deep fields produced by Euclid, the release featured a vast catalogue of galaxies and Einstein rings, covering a 63-square-degree portion of the sky.

In 2026, NASA and ESA will launch three more space-based telescopes and continue releasing data from groundbreaking missions such as Euclid and the James Webb Space Telescope.

The joint ESA and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) mission is set to launch atop a Vega-C
rocket on April 8, 2026. SMILE will investigate how Earths magnetosphere interacts with solar wind using soft X-ray and ultraviolet light.
Observations will be collected from a highly elliptical Earth orbit, with SMILEs apogee altitude set to be around 121,000 km.

Next, the highly anticipated launch of NASAs Nancy Grace Roman Space
Telescope is expected in October 2026 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9. An infrared wide-field survey telescope, Roman will use its 288-megapixel Wide Field Instrument (WFI) camera to perform sky surveys with a resolution similar to that of Hubble, while producing images nearly 200 times larger than Hubbles Wide Field Camera 3. Roman will also carry the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI), which will be used to detect exoplanets. Roman team members look at the fully constructed telescope at the Goddard Space Flight Center. (Credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshitey)

Construction of the Roman telescope was completed at the end of November, and the telescope is now undergoing final testing at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. NASA expects Roman to be shipped to Florida for launch later this summer.

The second of two ESA telescopes to launch in 2026, Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars (PLATO), is expected to launch in December 2026 atop an Ariane 62. As its name suggests, PLATO is an exoplanet mission that will investigate and search for exoplanet transits across their host stars. PLATO will study up to one million stars and aims to discover and characterize Earth-like exoplanets orbiting within their host stars habitable zones. PLATO also intends to study seismic activity within host stars, informing theories on stellar masses and evolution.

Outside of new telescope launches, Euclid is set to have a big year in 2026, with two major data releases. The first, Quick Data Release 2 (Q2), is expected to be released on June 24, 2026, and focus on Euclids survey of the Milky Ways inner galactic bulge. This survey was performed on March 23, 2025, and will be a collaborative study with NASAs upcoming Roman telescope.

The second Euclid data release in 2026, Data Release 1 (DR1), will be
released on Oct. 21, 2026. While the Quick Data Releases feature data collected over only a few weeks of observations and cover Euclids legacy science mission, DR1 will feature the first 1,900 square degrees of the main Euclid survey and much of the data it has collected since its launch in 2023. DR1 will also be the first Euclid data release to contain data specifically collected for the study of dark matter and dark energy.

(Lead image: Left: Blue Ghosts shadow after landing on the Moon. (Credit: Firefly Aerospace) Center: Webb NIRCam image of star cluster Pismis 24. (Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/A. Pagan) Right: Artists impression of NASAs twin ESCAPADE satellites entering Martian orbit. (Credit: James Rattray/Rocket Lab USA))



The post Space Science in 2026: New lunar explorers, Mars missions, and space telescopes appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com .



======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2026/01/space-science-2026-preview/


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 (Linux/64)
* Origin: tqwNet Science News (1337:1/100)