NASA’s most high-risk endeavor in decades and other boundary-pushing space missions planned for 2024

NASA’s most high-risk endeavor in decades is the return of humans to the moon—a goal that is the centerpiece of the agency’s Artemis program. The plan is to land astronauts near the south pole of the moon in 2024. NASA is also planning other ambitious missions for 2024. These include the continuation of a mission to send a spacecraft into the outermost asteroid belt; the launch of a list of commercial missions to the moon; a joint mission with the European Space Agency to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa; a new telescope to study distant exoplanets; and another telescope to study the interstellar object 2I/Borisov, a comet that was discovered in 2019. Finally, in late 2024, the Walls–Eclipse mission will fly a probe to a near-Earth asteroid to test technologies that could eventually be used to deflect or capture asteroids that might collide with Earth. The mission is expected to launch in April of that year.