Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • [♪ INTRO]

  • Congratulations!

  • You have made it almost all of the way through 2017.

  • There are moments where it felt like maybe we wouldn't.

  • Next year in space news, we've got a lot to look forward to, from rockets launching,

  • to spacecraft arriving at their destinations, to missions coming to an end.

  • And like we do around this time every year, we wanted to give you a sneak peek.

  • There are three missions that you can expect to hear more about in 2018.

  • In late November, Mars will receive another visitor: NASA's InSight mission,

  • which will likely launch in May.

  • It'll land on Mars to study its interior

  • to learn more about how the rocky planets formed.

  • All the rocky planets in our solar system have similar interior structures, with separate

  • layers including a crust, mantle, and core.

  • While scientists know the basics of how these layers formed,

  • how they separated is still poorly understood.

  • But Mars happens to be an ideal size to study how that happened.

  • It's massive enough to have experienced most, if not all, of those fundamental processes,

  • but not so massive that it lost evidence of them through years of geologic activity,

  • which is what happened to Earth.

  • InSight will be studying the basic properties of Mars's layers, like their size, thickness,

  • density, and composition, as well as how heat flows through them.

  • It'll also monitor seismic activity, the rate of meteorite impacts, and how Mars wobbles

  • due to the gravity of its moons and the Sun.

  • One of its three instruments will also hammer a probe 5 meters into Mars' surface, much

  • further down than any mission before it.

  • InSight was originally meant to launch in 2016, but engineers found a leak during testing,

  • so it missed its launch window.

  • And it took another 26 months for the Earth and Mars to line up for another shot.

  • Thankfully, InSight passed its most recent battery of tests this past November, so now

  • it'll be ready to launch in just a few months.

  • Speaking of delayed missions, the finalists of Google's Lunar X-PRIZE have a new deadline:

  • March 31, 2018.

  • This competition was announced back in 2007, and a year ago, five finalists were selected

  • to compete for the 20 million dollar grand prize.

  • To win, a team has to land a spacecraft on the Moon, move it at least 500 meters, and

  • transmit a variety of data, including videos, a panorama, and an email and text message.

  • The projects have to be almost entirely funded by private investors,

  • and it has to happen by the end of March.

  • Piece of cake, right?

  • The five final teams are Israel's SpaceIL, the US's Moon Express, India's TeamIndus,

  • Japan's HAKUTO, and the international team Synergy Moon.

  • SpaceIL would be the first group from Israel to land on the Moon, and if they win, they've

  • promised to donate the prize money to advance STEM education in their country.

  • To travel the required distance on the Moon, their lander will perform a “space hop.”

  • They'll land, take off again, then land 500 meters away.

  • Moon Express is also performing a space hop.

  • They have a contract with the company Rocket Lab and will launch from New Zealand, traveling

  • on a rocket that only had its first launch last May.

  • Synergy Moon, on the other hand, is the only team that can completely send itself all on

  • its own to the Moon, since one of companies involved builds and launches its own rockets.

  • Meanwhile, HAKUTO and TeamIndus will hitch the same ride to space

  • aboard a rocket from ISRO, India's space agency.

  • HAKUTO's four-kilogram rover has 3D printed wheels

  • and is built out of plastic reinforced with carbon fiber.

  • And TeamIndus's rover, called ECA for short, might be the most adorable of the bunch.

  • It even has its own comic strip on the team's website.

  • They're planning to land in the same region Apollo 15 did.

  • So far, it's still too early to say how many of the finalists will make it to the

  • Moon by Google's deadline, but if any of them clinch that grand prize, it'll open

  • up a totally new phase of lunar exploration.

  • The jury's still out on X-PRIZE, but we do know about one spacecraft that will definitely

  • reach its target next year: OSIRIS-REx, which will arrive at the asteroid Bennu this August.

  • Asteroids are left over from when the solar system formed, and are basically unchanged

  • records of the solar system from 4.5 billion years ago.

  • We can occasionally study them when meteorites hit Earth, but OSIRIS-REx will go straight

  • to the source, collecting a sample and bringing it home.

  • It launched back in September 2016 and has been making its way to Bennu,

  • which is located between Earth and Mars, ever since.

  • When it gets there in August, it'll spend a year mapping potential sampling sites before

  • approaching the surface and blasting Bennu with nitrogen,

  • which will dislodge rocks and dust to be captured.

  • Bennu is a rare, primitive type of asteroid that's chock full of carbon.

  • It's expected to have organic molecules and water-containing clays, and OSIRIS-REx

  • will be able to confirm those hypotheses.

  • It will also study how Bennu's momentum changes as it rotates and emits heat, which

  • will help scientists understand its long-term trajectory.

  • That's important because, over a century from now, Bennu could hit Earth, although

  • it's a slim chance, so, you probably don't need to worry too much

  • about your, like, potential grandkids.

  • OSIRIS-REx won't return to Earth until 2023, so like a lot of science missions, we'll

  • have to wait a few years before we get all that juicy data.

  • But luckily for us, there are way more missions running through 2018 and beyond, so we'll

  • have plenty to tell you about in the upcoming year.

  • Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow Space!

  • If you would like to keep learning about the universe with us next year, you can do that!

  • Just go to youtube.com/scishowspace and subscribe.

  • [♪ OUTRO]

[♪ INTRO]

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it