CHRONOLOGY OF SPACE EXPLORATION
2005 - NEAR FUTURE MISSIONS

January/February 2005 - Astro-E2 Mission
(Original mission lost during launch on Feb 10, 2000)
Astro-E2 will be Japan's fifth X-ray astronomy mission, and is being developed at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in collaboration with U.S. (NASA/GSFC, MIT) and Japanese institutions. Astro-E2 will cover the energy range 0.4 - 700 keV with the three instruments, X-ray micro-calorimeter (X-ray Spectrometer; XRS), X-ray CCDs (X-ray Imaging Spectrometer; XIS), and the hard X-ray detector (HXD).

July 2005 - Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter - USA Mars Orbiter
That spacecraft, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will make a more comprehensive inspection of our planetary neighbor than any previous mission. For starters, it will examine landscape details as small as a coffee table with the most powerful telescopic camera ever sent to orbit a foreign planet. Some of its other tools will scan underground layers for water and ice, identify small patches of surface minerals to determine their composition and origins, track changes in atmospheric water and dust, and check global weather every day.

November 2005 - STEREO
The STEREO observatories are scheduled to be launched on a Delta II 7925-10L rocket out of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida in November 2005. STEREO will provide revolutionary views of the Sun-Earth system, trace the flow of energy and matter from the Sun to the Earth, and more.

2005 - Selene - Japan Lunar Orbiter and Lander
The major objectives of the mission are to obtain scientific data of the lunar origin and evolution and to develop the technology for the future lunar exploration. The mission, which is the largest mission to the Moon after the Apollo program, will consist of a main orbiting satellite at about 100km altitude in the polar circular orbit and two sub satellites (Relay Satellite / VRAD Satellite) in elliptical orbits with apolune at 2400km and 800km. The orbiters will carry instruments for scientific investigation of the Moon, on the Moon, and from the Moon.

September 2006 - Solar-B
The Solar-B project is past the mid point of its Development phase. The delivery of US instruments to ISAS in Japan is scheduled to be complete by April 1, 2004. The delivery of the UK instrument to ISAS is scheduled for March 1, 2004. The Solar-B observatory is scheduled to be launched on a Japanese M-V rocket out of Kagoshima, Japan, in September 2006.

January 2007 - Planck
Planck is one of the European Space Agency's scientific missions planned for the first decade of the new millennium. It has been designed to help answer key questions for humankind: how did the Universe come to be and how will it evolve.

February 2007 - Herschel
The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory (formerly called Far InfraRed and Submillimetre Telescope or FIRST) will inaugurate a new generation of space telescopes. It will be the first space observatory covering the full far-infrared and submillimetre waveband, and the largest to work at those wavelengths.

February 2007 - GLAST
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) will open high-energy world to exploration and help us to answer these questions. With GLAST, astronomers will at long last have a superior tool to study how black holes, notorious for pulling matter in, can accelerate jets of gas outward at fantastic speeds.


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