Solar System mission roundup

NASA and the European Space Agency now have multiple Solar System missions in flight at once, with spacecraft headed to Europa, Titan, Jupiter’s icy moons, Mercury, and several asteroids. (nasa.gov) (esa.int) A planetary mission usually spends years cruising before it reaches its target, using planet flybys like slingshots to gain speed without carrying extra fuel. NASA’s Europa Clipper launched on Oct. 14, 2024, flew past Mars in February 2025, will swing by Earth in December 2026, and is scheduled to reach Jupiter in April 2030 for 49 close flybys of Europa. (nasa.gov) Europa Clipper is built to study whether Europa, a moon with a global ocean beneath ice, has conditions suitable for life. NASA says the spacecraft carries nine science instruments plus a gravity experiment that will operate during every flyby. (nasa.gov) Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is another ocean world candidate, but its water is buried under ice and its surface is covered in organic chemistry. NASA’s Dragonfly mission is a nuclear-powered rotorcraft, about car-sized, that remains on track for launch no earlier than July 2028 and arrival in late 2034. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) NASA said in January 2026 that Dragonfly would begin full rotorcraft integration and testing in early 2026 after a series of aerodynamic trials at Langley Research Center’s Transonic Dynamics Tunnel. The mission will hop between sites on Titan to investigate prebiotic chemistry, the chemical steps that can come before biology. (nasa.gov) Europe’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, is on a longer route to the Jupiter system. ESA’s mission calendar says Juice launched on April 14, 2023 and is planned to arrive at Jupiter on July 21, 2031, where it will study Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. (esa.int 1) (esa.int 2) ESA also said in March 2026 that its Hera spacecraft completed a deep-space maneuver that kept it on course for rendezvous with the Didymos binary asteroid system later in 2026. Hera follows NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test impact and is meant to measure Dimorphos and Didymos closely enough to turn that one-off strike into a tested planetary-defense method. (esa.int 1) (esa.int 2) Asteroid missions are filling out the same picture from another angle: how the Solar System formed and how to deal with hazardous rocks near Earth. NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is en route to the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche, while OSIRIS-APEX is heading for Apophis, which will pass within 20,000 miles, or 32,000 kilometers, of Earth’s surface in April 2029. (jpl.nasa.gov) (nasa.gov) Mercury is in the mix too, even though it is the least explored inner planet and one of the hardest to reach because spacecraft must shed so much solar-orbit speed. ESA says BepiColombo, a joint Europe-Japan mission, will become the second and most complex mission ever to orbit Mercury. (esa.int) The common thread is that agencies are no longer flying one flagship planetary mission at a time. They are running a convoy of long-distance expeditions, with the next decisive moments spread across late 2026, 2028, 2029, 2030, 2031, and 2034. (esa.int) (nasa.gov) (nasa.gov)