Important Missions of NASA – UPSC

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research.

• Established under the National Aeronautics and Space Act 1958
• Headquarters: Washington, DC, USA

History – NASA

Following World War II, the United States was in direct competition with the erstwhile Soviet Union (the superpower that was disbanded into several sovereign nations including the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, etc. in 1991). That period was called the “Cold War”.

It was the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, that first put an object into orbit around Earth.

It was followed in November by the even larger Sputnik II, which carried the dog Laika.

Only in late January 1958, the United States could launch Explorer 1, hoisted aloft by the Army’s rocket team, using rocket technology developed from World War II.

• Though a small spacecraft weighing only 30 pounds, it discovered what is now known as the Van Allen radiation belts, named for the University of Iowa scientist Dr. James Van Allen, launching the new discipline of space science.
• Explorer 1 was followed in March 1958 by the Navy’s Vanguard 1, 6 inches in diameter and weighing only 3 pounds.

NASA’s birth was directly related to the launch of the Sputniks and the ensuing race to demonstrate technological superiority in space.

Driven by the competition of the Cold War, on July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, providing for research into the problems of flight within Earth’s atmosphere and in space.

After a protracted debate over military versus civilian control of space, the act inaugurated a new civilian agency designated the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Objectives of NASA

• To expand human knowledge of space
• To lead the world in space-related technological innovation
• To develop vehicles that can carry both equipment and living organisms into space
• To coordinate with international space agencies to achieve the greatest possible scientific advancements.

Important Missions of NASA

JUNO MISSION

• Determine how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which helps determine which planet formation theory is correct (or if new theories are needed)
• Look deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure composition, temperature, cloud motions, and other properties
• Map Jupiter’s magnetic and gravity fields, revealing the planet’s deep structure
• Explore and study Jupiter’s magnetosphere near the planet’s poles, especially the auroras – Jupiter’s northern and southern lights – providing new insights into how the planet’s enormous magnetic force field affects its atmosphere

NEW HORIZON

• The First Mission to the Pluto System and the Kuiper Belt
• The New Horizons mission is helping us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt – a relic of solar system formation.
• The Kuiper Belt is a region of space. The known icy worlds and comets in both regions are much smaller than Earth’s Moon.
• The Kuiper Belt is a doughnut-shaped ring of icy objects around the Sun, extending just beyond the orbit of Neptune from about 30 to 55 AU.

CASSINI MISSION

The Cassini–Huygens mission, commonly called Cassini, was a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency to send a probe to study the planet Saturn and its system, including its rings and natural satellites.

INSIGHT

• InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is a NASA Discovery Program mission that will place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior.
• But InSight is more than a Mars mission – it is a terrestrial planet explorer that will address one of the most fundamental issues of planetary and solar system science – understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.

PUNCH & TRACERS MISSION

NASA has selected two new missions to advance our understanding of the Sun and its dynamic effects on space. One of the selected missions will study how the Sun drives particles and energy into the solar system and a second will study Earth’s response.

• The Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH, the mission will focus directly on the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and how it generates the solar wind. Composed of four suitcase-sized satellites, PUNCH will image and track the solar wind as it leaves the Sun.
• The spacecraft also will track coronal mass ejections – large eruptions of solar material that can drive large space weather events near Earth – to better understand their evolution and develop new techniques for predicting such eruptions.
• The second mission is Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS.
• The TRACERS investigation was partially selected as a NASA-launched rideshare mission, meaning it will be launched as a secondary payload with PUNCH.
• TRACERS will observe particles and fields at the Earth’s northern magnetic cusp region – the region encircling Earth’s pole, where our planet’s magnetic field lines curve down toward Earth.
• Here, the field lines guide particles from the boundary between Earth’s magnetic field and interplanetary space down into the atmosphere.

MESSENGER

Understanding Mercury, the smallest, densest, and least-explored of the terrestrial planets

The spacecraft was launched aboard a Delta II rocket in August 2004 to study Mercury’s chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field.

New observations by the MESSENGER spacecraft provide compelling support for the long-held hypothesis that Mercury harbors abundant water ice and other frozen volatile materials in its permanently shadowed polar craters.

The instruments carried by MESSENGER were used on a complex series of flybys – the spacecraft flew by Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury itself three times, allowing it to decelerate relative to Mercury using minimal fuel. During its first flyby of Mercury in January 2008, MESSENGER became the second mission after Mariner 10’s 1975 flyby to reach Mercury.

The MESSENGER mission was designed to study the characteristics and environment of Mercury from orbit. Specifically, the scientific objectives of the mission were:

• To characterize the chemical composition of Mercury’s surface.
• To study the planet’s geologic history.
• To elucidate the nature of the global magnetic field (magnetosphere).
• To determine the size and state of the core.
• To determine the volatile inventory at the poles.
• To study the nature of Mercury’s exosphere.

OSIRIS-REX

OSIRIS-Rex stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.

It is a NASA asteroid study and sample-return mission.

OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which previously sent the New Horizons spacecraft zooming by Pluto and the Juno spacecraft into orbit around Jupiter.

Why was Bennu chosen?

Bennu was selected for a the OSIRIS-REx mission from over 500,000 known asteroids, due to it fitting a number of key criteria. These include:

Proximity to Earth: In order for OSIRIS-REx to reach its destination in a reasonable timeframe, NASA needed to find an asteroid which had a similar orbit to Earth.

Size: Small asteroids, those less than 200m in diameter, typically spin much faster than larger asteroids, meaning the regolith material can be ejected into space. Bennu is around 500m in diameter, so rotates slowly enough to ensure that the regolith stays on its surface.

Composition: Bennu is a primitive asteroid, meaning it hasn’t significantly changed since the beginning of the Solar System (over 4 billion years ago). It is also very carbon-rich, meaning it may contain organic molecules, which could have been precursors to life on Earth.

Additionally, Bennu is of interest as it is a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA). Every 6 years, Bennu’s orbit brings it within 200,000 miles of the Earth, which means it has a high probability of impacting Earth in the late 22nd Century.

VOYAGER 1

It is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. Part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System. It is in interstellar space.

SPACE ELEVATOR

• A space elevator is a proposed type of space transportation system. It is a highly ambitious program inspired by sci-fi stories.
• Its main component will be a ribbon-like cable anchored to the surface and extending into space. It is designed to permit vehicle transport along the cable from a planetary surface, such as the Earth’s, directly into space or orbit, without the use of large rockets.
• An Earth-based space elevator would consist of a cable with one end attached to the surface near the equator and the other end in space beyond geostationary orbit.
• It will carry humans and other objects to space without rockets.

SOFIA-STRATOSPHERIC OBSERVATORY FOR INFRARED ASTRONOMY

• The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to construct and maintain an airborne observatory.
• NASA awarded the contract for the development of the aircraft, operation of the observatory, and management of the American part of the project to the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) in 1996.
• SOFIA is the largest airborne observatory in the world, capable of making observations that are impossible for even the largest and highest ground-based telescopes. During its planned 20-year lifetime, SOFIA also will inspire the development of new scientific instrumentation and foster the education of young scientists and engineers.

ORBITING CARBON OBSERVATORY

• The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) is a NASA satellite mission intended to provide global space-based observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).
• The original spacecraft was lost in a launch failure on February 24, 2009, when the payload fairing of the Taurus rocket which was carrying it failed to separate during ascent.
• The added mass of the failing prevented the satellite from reaching orbit. It subsequently re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Indian Ocean near Antarctica. The replacement satellite, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, was launched on July 2, 2014.
• OCO will fly in a near-polar orbit which enables the instrument to observe most of Earth’s surface at least once every sixteen days.
• It is intended to fly in loose formation with a series of other Earth-orbiting satellites known as the Earth Observing System Afternoon Constellation, or the A-train.
• This coordinated flight formation was intended to enable researchers to correlate OCO data with data acquired by other instruments on other spacecraft.

SOLAR DYNAMIC OBSERVATORY (SDO)

• SDO is NASA’s project initiated in 2010 to observe the influence of the Sun on the Sun-Earth System.
• This project is part of the Living with a Star (LWS) program of NASA
• SDO’s goal is to understand the solar variations that influence life and society on Earth.

SPHEREx

NASA will launch a new space telescope mission Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) in 2023.

• The launch could help astronomers understand how the Universe evolved in the first place and how common the ingredients for life are within it.

Missions’ Objective

• SPHEREx will survey the sky in optical as well as near-infrared light.
• Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in Milky Way.
• The mission will create a map of the entire sky in 96 different colour bands.

Significance

• SPHEREx’s main goal is to search for the fundamentals of life — water and organic matter within the Milky Way.
• Beyond Milky Way, it will also be looking at the wider regions of the universe, where stars are born.
• This will give scientists targets for more detailed study in future missions, like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.
• It will deliver an unprecedented galactic map containing ‘fingerprints’ from the first moments in the universe’s history.
• It will provide new clues to one of the greatest mysteries in science that what made the universe expand so quickly less than a nanosecond after the Big Bang.

ICON AND GOLD

• By NASA- The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD and the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON- Study of the ionosphere
• GOLD in Geostationary orbit over Western Hemisphere
• ICON- Low-Earth Orbit
• The ionosphere is located between 60 and 400 km above the mesopause.
• It contains electrically charged particles known as ions, and hence, it is known as the ionosphere. Radio waves transmitted from the earth are reflected back to the earth by this layer and is used for radio propagation to distant places on the Earth. In this layer, the temperature starts increasing with height.

NASA – Crewed programs

Program	Start date	First crewed flight	End date	Notes
Mercury program	1958	1961	1963	First U.S. crewed program
Gemini program	1961	1965	1966	The program used to practice space rendezvous and EVAs
Apollo program	1960	1968	1972	Landed first humans on the Moon
Skylab	1964	1973	1974	First American space station
Apollo–Soyuz Test Project	1971	1975	1975	Joint with the Soviet Union
Space Shuttle	1972	1981	2011	First missions in which a spacecraft was reused
Shuttle-Mir Program	1993	1995	1998	Russian partnership
International Space Station	1993	1998	Ongoing	Joint with Roscosmos, CSA, ESA, and JAXA; Americans flew on Russian Soyuz after 2011 retirement of Space Shuttle
Commercial Crew Program	2011	2020	Ongoing	Current program to shuttle Americans to the ISS
Artemis program	2017	Ongoing	Ongoing	Current program to bring humans to the Moon again

Artemis Mission

NASA wants to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by the year 2024, which it plans on doing through the Artemis lunar exploration program.

ARTEMIS stands for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of Moon’s Interaction with the Sun.

The mission was named Artemis after the Greek mythological goddess of the Moon and twin sister to Apollo, the namesake of the program that sent 12 American astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972.

Objective: The main objective is to measure what happens when the Sun’s radiation hits our rocky moon, where there is no magnetic field to protect it.

The mission:

For the Artemis program, NASA’s new rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) will send astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft a quarter of a million miles away from Earth to the lunar orbit.

Once astronauts dock Orion at the Gateway — which is a small spaceship in orbit around the moon — the astronauts will be able to live and work around the Moon, and from the spaceship, astronauts will take expeditions to the surface of the Moon.

Lunar missions- key facts:

• Before the US sent the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, it sent three classes of robotic missions between 1961 and 1968. 
• On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to step on the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.
• After July 1969, 12 American astronauts walked on the surface of the Moon until 1972.
• In 1959, the Soviet Union’s uncrewed Luna 1 and 2 became the first rover to visit the Moon. Since then, seven nations have followed suit.
• In the 1990s, the US resumed lunar exploration with robotic missions Clementine and Lunar Prospector.
• In 2009, it began a new series of robotic lunar missions with the launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS).
• In 2011, NASA began the ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun) mission using a pair of repurposed spacecraft and in 2012 the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft studied the Moon’s gravity.
• Apart from the US, the European Space Agency, Japan, China, and India have sent missions to explore the Moon.
• China landed two rovers on the surface, which includes the first-ever landing on the Moon’s far side in 2019.
• The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) recently announced India’s third lunar mission Chandrayaan-3, which will comprise a lander and a rover.

Dawn Mission

• Dawn mission was launched by NASAdeploying spacecraft to study the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres.
• It is the only mission ever to orbit two extraterrestrial targets and will characterize the early solar system and the processes that dominated its formation.
• Vesta and Ceres are celestial bodies believed to have accreted early in the history of the solar system.
• Dawn orbited giant asteroid Vesta for 14 months from 2011 to 2012, then continued on to Ceres, where it has been in orbit since March 2015.
• The spacecraft is likely to run out of a key fuel known as hydrazine which keeps it oriented and in communication with Earth.

DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test)

The DART is a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid.

DART would be NASA’s first mission to demonstrate what’s known as the kinetic impactor technique – striking the asteroid to shift its orbit – to defend against a potential future asteroid impact.

Heliophysics Missions

• NASA has approved two heliophysics missions to explore the Sun and the system that drives space weather near Earth.
• Understanding the physics that drive the solar wind and solar explosions could help in predicting these events.
• Together, NASA’s contribution to the following will help in understanding the Sun and Earth as an interconnected system,
  1. Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope Epsilon Mission (EUVST) and
  2. Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE)
• Funding comes from the Heliophysics Explorers Program, managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

EUVST

• The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) leads the EUVST Epsilon Mission (Solar-C EUVST Mission), along with other partners.
• Targeted for launch in 2026, EUVST is a solar telescope.
• It will study how the solar atmosphere releases solar wind and drives eruptions of solar material.
• These phenomena propagate out from the Sun and influence the space radiation environment throughout the solar system.
• EUVST will take comprehensive UV spectroscopy measurements of the solar atmosphere at the highest level of detail to date.
• This will allow scientists to tease out how different magnetic and plasma processes drive coronal heating and energy release.

EZIE

• To be launched in 2024, EZIE will study electric currents in Earth’s atmosphere linking aurora to Earth’s magnetosphere that responds to solar activity and other factors.
• EZIE is an investigation comprising a trio of CubeSats that will study the source of and changes in the auroral electrojet (AE).
• [AE is an electric current circling through Earth’s atmosphere around 60-90 miles above the surface and extending into the magnetosphere.
• They are generated by changes in the structure of the magnetotail.]
• The interaction of the magnetosphere and the solar wind compresses the Sun-facing side of the magnetosphere.
• This drags out the night-time side of the magnetosphere into what is called a magnetotail.
• The same space weather phenomena that power the aurora can cause interference with radio and communication signals and utility grids on Earth’s surface, and damage to spacecraft in orbit.

Planetary Missions