Astronomers, cosmologists, and space engineers predict that 2021 will be a significant year for space exploration. More and more countries and commercial companies are investing in technology to venture into the heavens.
Entrepreneurs like SpaceX's Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson are sending astronauts to Mars targeting space tourism. What once looked like science fiction is rapidly becoming a space fact. New types of holidays may amaze advances in these technologies such as asteroid mining, Mars colonization, or weekend breaks to the moon.
This year will start with an exciting project that will help scientists better understand the universe. NASA will launch its Q-PACE probe on January 15th. It will study the collision of small particles in space to provide insight into how planets first formed.
A month later, NASA's perseverance probe will land on Mars. This task will test for signs of the possibility of microbes in the past. NASA said, "Sending samples of Mars back to Earth has been the goal of planetary scientists since the beginning of the Space Age."
In October, the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Telescope, will be launched into space. Its mission is to observe the first galaxies formed in the early universe.
