In that spirit, the next generation of planetary missions will look past surface appearances. NASA’s InSight probe, launching in March, will establish a seismic station on the Red Planet; it will sense marsquakes and use them to map the planet’s interior. A complementary European-Russian probe called ExoMars 2016, lifting off almost simultaneously, will use a chemical sniffer to ferret out atmospheric methane from possible Martian microbes. Then in September, OSIRIS-REx will head to Bennu, the kind of carbon-rich asteroid that may have seeded ancient life on Earth, to collect samples and bring them home for analysis. Equally notable is a move to open the solar system to all. The InSight probe will bring two miniature satellites, or CubeSats, that will go into orbit to create a dedicated Mars communications network. Student-built CubeSats are already widely deployed around Earth; if InSight’s work, expect the DIY movement to spread to other planets. NASA’s Juno probe, which reaches Jupiter in July, has an even more populist mission. It carries a camera designed solely for students and citizen scientists—the first time an entire planet has been turned over to the public. In the words of NASA’s John Grunsfeld: “Five hundred years from now, we will look back on this as the golden age of exploration.” This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science, as part of our Big Ideas Of 2016 feature.
