Small planetary（行星） bodies is the big focus of space exploration in 2023 and People are eager to solve many of the mysteries about these tiny worlds. In 2023, the launching of two spacecrafts aims to explore some of the solar system's smaller bodies, in an effort to understand how worlds become suitable habitats for humans to live in.
The first task Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) was launched in April 2023 and is scheduled to land in 2031. This spacecraft from the European Space Agency (ESA) is designed to explore three of Jupiter's major moons: Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. They are thought to have oceans of liquid water beneath their frozen shells.
"The thing we are most interested in is the liquid oceans and in particular with Ganymede –we don't know the location, the depth ,the composition of these oceans," says ESA's Olivier Witasse, the project scientist. "While JUICE has many goals, the most exciting one is to hunt for life there as water is crucial to life ".
Due to launch in October 2024 and arrive in 2030, the other spacecraft Psyche from NASA is named after the asteroid(小行星) it will land. Researchers believe Psyche to be an exposed iron core of a young planet. Studying planetary cores is nearly impossible on actual planets because they are so deep underground, so Psyche could present a unique opportunity.
"The core is always crucial. For the Earth, it creates magnetic field （磁场 ） and gives off heat," says one of the researchers of Psyche, "One of the ways to answer why Earth is habitable is to study how it was built, and Psyche is part of that story. We don't know what we're going to find, and if blessed, we're going to be completely surprised because there was no previous data."
Habitability （宜居性） in our solar system is still a huge mystery, but the two spacecrafts should bring us one step closer to understanding it.
