2015 was an amazing year in space, as worlds such as Pluto and Ceres snapped into sharp focus.
2015 also underlined the mantra that ‘space is hard,’ as SpaceX rode the roller coaster from launch failure, to a dramatic return to flight in December, complete with a nighttime landing of its stage 1 Falcon 9 rocket back at Cape Canaveral.
So, what’s in store for 2016?
How about a mission to Mars, Jupiter, and – just maybe — a groundbreaking discovery in astrophysics? Here’s our drill-down of space stories to watch in 2016.
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Juno arrives at Jupiter.
After several years of space travel, NASA’s Juno mission will enter orbit around Jupiter next year. Launched from Cape Canaveral on August 5th, 2011, Juno will only be the second spacecraft to enter orbit around Jupiter, and the first mission to the outer solar system that won’t utilize nuclear power.
Instead, Juno is equipped with three enormous bus-sized solar panels. Juno will study the magnetosphere, magnetic field and gravitational environment of Jove in its wide-ranging path. Expect Juno to enter orbit around Jupiter on July 4th, 2016.
Will we discover gravitational waves?
Could astronomers directly detect gravitational waves in the coming year? Just over a century after Einstein’s special theory of relativity predicted them. It’s a very real possibility, as the Advanced LIGO project went online in late 2015. Sporting ten times the sensitivity of the original LIGO project, Advanced LIGO ‘should’ detect gravitational waves generated by black hole and pulsar mergers and extra-galactic supernovae.
If it doesn’t, something is seriously wrong with our theories of cosmology. This could be the physics story of 2016 along the lines of the CERN Higgs-Boson discovery, if direct detection is accomplished.
Heavy rockets take flight.
Both China and SpaceX may debut their heavy lift rockets in 2016. China is set to perform its inaugural launch of its Long March 5 rocket from Wenchang Space Center sometime in the next year. Meanwhile, SpaceX is set to launch its Falcon Heavy lift rocket from the Kennedy Space Center this coming April.
Yeah, I know: we’ve been chasing this one as a ‘space story to watch’ for a couple years now… but 2016 looks like the year that the Falcon Heavy will indeed break the surly bonds. And NASA’s SLS heavy lifter? Expect the first uncrewed flight in the 2018 time frame, with astronauts riding atop the rocket beyond low Earth orbit three years beyond that.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider