Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Solar System Missions Update 2021-04

Here's my map of all active and future Solar System Missions as of April 1st 2021.

On April 1st Mars helicopter Ingenuity will likely already be standing on it's own legs, independent from Perseverance. The first flight is expected on the 11th. Next up will be the Chinese Tianwen-1 lander EDL to Utopia Planitia in May or June.

This month OSIRISREx will do one last Bennu close approach on April 6th before departing the asteroid towards Earth on May 5th. Parker Solar Probe has its eighth perihelion at 0.074 AU (~11 million km) on the 29th. Also this month NASA will probably select a lunar lander for the Artemis program.

New in the list of future missions is the Indian Shukrayaan Venus orbiter that will probably launch in 2024 if it happens. Finally, the Chinese Change'5 orbiter has reached the Earth/Sun L1 lagrange point.

Data, images and documentation are available on my space exploration history GitHub repository and the associated website.

[Dates corrected 2021-4-2]

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