2020 to See Veritable Mars Invasion

2020 will see a veritable Mars invasion as several spacecraft, including three landers, head to the red planet. NASA will launch its Mars 2020 rover, which will stash rock samples that will be returned to Earth in a future mission and will also feature a small, detachable helicopter drone.

Nature magazine announced in its articles that China will send its first lander to Mars, Huoxing-1, which will deploy a small rover.

A Russian spacecraft will deliver a European Space Agency (ESA) rover to the red planet — if issues with the landing parachute can be resolved.

The United Arab Emirates will send an orbiter, in the first Mars mission by an Arab country.

Big sky, big data

Following the media splash made by its image of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration expects to release new results, this time about the black hole at the Milky Way’s center. This could include multiple images and perhaps even a movie of gas swirling around the behemoth, which is called Sagittarius A*.

Later in the year, ESA’s Gaia mission will update its 3D map of the Milky Way, which has markedly changed how scientists understand the Galaxy’s structure and evolution. And gravitational-wave astronomers will unveil the troves of cosmic collisions they observed in 2019 that created ripples in space-time. These include many mergers of black holes but also previously unseen collisions of a black hole and a star.