With about 200 orbital launches scheduled and ambitious missions on everything from lunar bases to the search for life in the works, there’s a lot to watch in 2022. An astronomer explains the highlights.
Clouds, hellish temperatures, endless nights? Characterizing the atmosphere of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the sun, is a formidable task.
Hubble: NASA, ESA, and Q.D. Wang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst); Spitzer: NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech)
Such a mission could be developed soon, allowing astrophysicists to take selfies of the solar system and use the Sun’s gravity as a lens to peer deep into space.
Hubble took pictures of the oldest galaxies it could – seen here – but the James Webb Space Telescope can go back much farther in time.
NASA
The James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch into orbit in December 2021. Its mission is to search for the first light to ever shine in the universe.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the biggest orbital telescope ever built and is scheduled to be launched into space on Dec. 18, 2021.
NASA/Desiree Stover
The largest orbital telescope ever made will allow astronomers to study the atmospheres of alien planets, learn about how stars form in the Milky Way and peer into the farthest reaches of the universe.
Artist impression of KELT-9 b, the orange blob orbiting a blue star.
Léa Changeat
Thirty years ago the Hubble Space Telescope began snapping photos of distant stars, providing a time machine that has taken astronomers back to when the universe was less than a billion years old.
An enhanced image of galaxy clusters.
(NASA/Shutterstock)
We don’t need to look for Earth-like planets exclusively around Sun-like stars. Tiny, dim TRAPPIST-1 has only 11 percent the diameter of the Sun and is much redder.