Project Apollo’s goals went beyond landing Americans on the moon and returning them safely to Earth. They included establishing the technology to meet other national interests in space, carrying out a program of scientific exploration of the Moon and developing man’s capability to work in the lunar environment.
SSERVI Australia researchers with active experiments deployed on the Moon on Apollo missions: Brian O’Brien, Apollo 11, 12, 14 (two different experiments), and 15.
BepiColombo, an ESA mission being conducted in cooperation with Japan, will explore Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun.
SSERVI Australia researchers on BepiColombo mission: Phil Bland
The GRAIL mission placed two spacecraft into the same orbit around the Moon. As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity, caused both by visible features such as mountains and craters and by masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, they move slightly toward and away from each other. An instrument aboard each spacecraft measured the changes in their relative velocity very precisely, and scientists translated this information into a high-resolution map of the Moon’s gravitational field.
SSERVI Australia researchers on GRAIL mission: Katarina Miljkovic
The purpose of the Hayabusa mission is sample return from the Itokawa by traveling through space using an ion engine and arriving at the asteroid autonomously to acquire a material sample.
SSERVI Australia researchers on Hayabusa mission: Fred Jourdan, Trevor Ireland
Asteroid Explorer “Hayabusa2” is a successor of “Hayabusa” (MUSES-C), which revealed several new technologies and returned to Earth in June 2010.
SSERVI Australia researchers on Hayabusa2 mission: Trevor Ireland
InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is a NASA Discovery Program mission that will place a geophysical station on Mars to study its crust and interior.
SSERVI Australia researchers on InSight: Katarina Miljkovic
With its rover named Curiosity, Mars Science Laboratory mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet. Curiosity was designed to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes.
SSERVI Australia researchers on Mars Science Laboratory mission: Penny King
OSIRIS-REx seeks answers to the questions that are central to the human experience: Where did we come from? What is our destiny? As the leftover debris from the solar system formation process that began over four billion years ago, asteroids can teach us a lot about the history of the Sun and planets. The OSIRIS-REx mission is to collect and bring back to Earth a sample of Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid that records the earliest history of our Solar System.
SSERVI Australia researchers on OSIRIS-REx mission: Trevor Ireland, Phil Bland