Filippo Venturi Photography | Blog

2014

• November – (Rosetta) – ESA mission reaches Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
• November – (Philae) – ESA Rosetta Lander touches down on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
• Virgin Galactic will begin scheduled flights of SpaceShipTwo to sub-orbit.

2015

• February 1 – (Dawn) – NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will enter orbit around Ceres), the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet.
• May – The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch an orbiter towards Venus.
• July 14 – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will arrive at Pluto, becoming the first spacecraft to flyby the dwarf planet and also returning the first close-up images of this distant world and its moons.
• August 15 – BepiColombo – Launch of ESA and ISAS Orbiter and Lander Missions to Mercury)
• October – The Google Lunar X Prize may be won by Astrobotic Technology, who has a contract with SpaceX to use one of their rockets to take a lunar rover to the Moon.
• The ESA’s Don Quijote) spacecraft will launch, a mission to impact an asteroid and study the change in its trajectory to see if such a method could be used to deflect an asteroid away from Earth.
• China will land its unmanned Chang’e 4 spacecraft on the Moon.
• Russia is expected to land two unmanned probes on the Moon, Luna-Glob 1 and 2.

2016

• March – NASA’s next Mars lander, InSight, will launch to the Red Planet to study beneath the surface using a drill.
• The first part of the ESA’s ExoMars mission, the Trace Gas Orbiter (to study the atmosphere) and the EDM lander (to test landing technologies), will launch to Mars.
• September – NASA will launch its own asteroid sample return mission, called OSIRIS-REx.
• Bearing the same name as its successful probes in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Russia will launch a new orbiter called Venera-D to Venus.
• Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser spacecraft will complete its first flight, launching on an Atlas V rocket.
• NASA’s solar powered Juno) spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter.
• The The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will land its Chandrayaan-2 rover on the Moon, in tandem with a lunar orbiter.

2017

• July – The ESA’s new solar orbiter, SOLO, will launch to the Sun.
• December – First flight of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, taking the (Orion) spacecraft on an unmanned flight around the Moon.
• China will launch another mission to the Moon, Chang’e 5, this time with the goal of returning lunar samples to Earth.

2018

• January – Inspiration Mars will launch two people to Mars on a 501-day mission to flyby the Red Planet and return to Earth.
• NASA’s Solar Probe Plus will launch and will approach the Sun to within 8.5 solar radii (0.034 AU, 5.9 million kilometres), the closest any spacecraft has been to the Sun.
• The ESA’s ExoMars rover will launch to the Red Planet, using the previously launched Trace Gas Orbiter as its means to communicate with Earth.
• NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, will launch.

2019

• A proposed NASA telescope called EXCEDE (Exoplanetary Circumstellar Environments and Disk Explorer) will launch to observe planet formation around nearby stars.

2020

• The ISS will be decommissioned and de-orbited at some point after 2020.
• Russia will launch an orbiter, lander and rover to the Moon on the Luna-Grunt 1 mission.

2021

• Russia’s next lunar lander, *Luna-Grunt 28, will return samples to Earth.
  NASA’s (Orion) spacecraft will fly with a crew for the first time, possibly taking astronauts to visit an asteroid.

2023

• Mars One is expected to land the first human settlers on the Red Planet.

2024

• Solar Probe Plus will fly into the Sun’s atmosphere (or corona) for the first time.

2231

• April 5 – Pluto – is passed by Neptune in distance from the Sun for the next 20 years.

10,000

• Pioneer 10 passes within 3.8 light years of Barnard’s Star.

296,000

• Voyager 2 passes within 4.3 light years of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

4,000,000

• Pioneer 11 – NASA flyby of star Lambda Aquila.

1,000,000,000

• Estimated lifespan of the two Voyager Golden Records, before the information stored on them is rendered unrecoverable.

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Source: reddit.com