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Planetary Exploration In 2016 (planetary.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society blog has put together a post about all of the space missions set to return data from planets, moons, and other bodies in the solar system this year. She's also assembled some cool visualizations of when the missions are active at their locations of interest. In summary: "Akatsuki is at Venus, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and two Chang'e missions at the Moon, two rovers and five orbiters are active at Mars, Dawn is at Ceres, Rosetta is at 67P, Cassini is at Saturn, and although New Horizons is far past Pluto, it'll be sending back new Pluto science data for most of the year, so I'm counting that as still doing science. Another two missions (Hayabusa2 and Juno) are in their cruise phase; Juno arrives at Jupiter in August. Two (ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and OSIRIS-Rex) or three (if you count the Schiaparelli lander separately) will launch this year, with their science starting after 2016."
The Juno mission to Jupiter this year looks pretty interesting. We should find out if Jupiter has a rocky core, some nice polar images, and detailed measurements that might shed light on the early solar system formation. As far as I understand it isn't known if Jupiter formed near the Sun and moved out or not, and this has huge implications for Earth's early history and more generally for systems around other stars.
That was science as well, it marked the start of a new batch of science data to be processed.
There's always use for old data when doing science, the Viking probe data on Mars is very useful when it comes to analyzing the more modern data from the later probes. Both as a reference and also when new data provides new reference points it can be used to re-evaluate the old Viking data.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
We're in a golden age of robotic exploration. The diagram doesn't really show this quite as much because it only goes back to the year 2003, but you can see it a little bit in this diagram based on how few lines trail off the left-hand side of the diagram and how many more don't just start sometime in the last decade but have very long lines. Since 2003 there has been no point where we haven't had at least three Mars missions ongoing giving back actual data and often four or five. Mars currently has 7 different active missions, and that number is set to actually grow over the next few years. The situation for other bodies looks not as extreme, but very similar. At the start of the diagram, there are zero Venus missions or Mercury, either active or underway, and since 2005 for both planets there's been at least one each active or underway for each planet. Similar statements apply to the other categories in the diagram. The only one we are roughly holding steady is missions to the gas giants. Even there there's been an uptick but not as large.