Humanity explores the solar system

Here's a cool summary of all the upcoming events up to 2020, with the name and the goal of the missions.

There will be no less than 34 scheduled mission in the whole solar system:

What spacecraft is humanity currently using to explore our Solar System?

Presently, every inner planet has at least one robotic explorer, while several others are monitoring our Sun, some are mapping Earth's Moon, a few are chasing asteroids and comets, one is orbiting Saturn, and several are even heading out into deep space.

The above illustration gives more details, with the inner Solar System depicted on the upper right and the outer Solar System on the lower left. Given the present armada, our current epoch might become known as the time when humanity first probed its own star system. Sometimes widely separated spacecraft act together as an InterPlanetary Network to determine the direction of distant explosions by noting when each probe detects high energy photons.

Future spacecraft milestones, as indicated along the bottom of the graphic, include Dawn reaching Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, and New Horizons reaching Pluto, both in 2015.

APOD
Original source and widescreen version: The Planetary Society

Unless some of the above missions you have mentioned include a return to the Moon with a semi permanent base in my opinion we are kind of dragging our heels.

Human beings are explorers by nature, so why have we stopped exploring?

SnF for the info all the same.

It's kind of chocking how much we actually send out to space when you think about it.

But the question is, will we ever be able to send manned missions out of the Solarsystem.

We have some "planned" manned missions to Mars, but the danger and cost is a big bottleneck, so much could go wrong.

So manned missions out of the Solarsystem is propably so far away, that it might never happen.

S+F

Interesting.!!!!

Originally posted by andy06shake
Unless some of the above missions you have mentioned include a return to the Moon with a semi permanent base in my opinion we are kind of dragging our heels.

Human beings are explorers by nature, so why have we stopped exploring?

edit on 30-4-2013 by andy06shake because: (no reason given)

I totally agree. Why has the moon been left untouched?

Yea... growing up and watching shows like...

UFO - 1970s


Space 1999


I soooo hoped to have moon bases by the time I got old. Doesnt look like its gonna happen in my remaining days... /sadface

Just glad we are exploring still instead of saying "forget it".

Oh well... i do love what data and pictures unmanned probes give us. Just hope we will survive long enough as a species to learn enough to overcome the challenges presented by manned space exploration.

I believe one day we will colonize space. I don't think it will happen the way we would like with FTL drives. I imagine we will have to use ships where generations of families will live or some kind of stasis until the desired destination is reached. One thing I never see discussed is how we are supposed to communicate with earth when we are light years away. If we do setup a colony how is the colony supposed to communicate and be governed from earth. Will we drop satellites every so often? I find that would be unreliable. How will they be powered and maintained and kept stationary? I have no idea how communication will work across light years.