Chang'e 7 — hunting lunar ice at the south pole
China's Chang'e 7 mission targets the Moon's south pole, an area of intense international interest because permanently shadowed crater floors there may hold water ice — a potential resource for future crewed bases. The mission pairs a lander and rover with an unusual "flying probe" designed to hop into shadowed craters a wheeled rover can't safely enter.
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — Hubble's wide-angle sibling
Roman shares Hubble's 2.4-meter mirror but pairs it with a much wider field of view — capturing roughly 100 times the sky area in a single exposure. That makes it built for survey science: large-scale mapping of dark energy's effect on cosmic structure, and a dedicated search for exoplanets using gravitational microlensing, a technique that can find planets Hubble-style telescopes would never catch.
PLATO — Europe's Earth-hunter
The European Space Agency's PLATO mission uses an unusual design: 26 individual cameras working together, rather than one large mirror, to watch a huge number of stars simultaneously for the tiny brightness dips that indicate an orbiting planet. Its specific target is Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars — the category most relevant to the question of whether Earth-like worlds are common.
MMX — sampling a moon of Mars
Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission aims to land on Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons, collect a surface sample, and return it to Earth by 2031. The science question is genuinely open: Phobos might be a captured asteroid, or it might be debris from an ancient impact on Mars itself — and only a returned sample can settle which.
Hera — grading humanity's first planetary defense test
NASA's DART mission deliberately crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, successfully changing its orbit — the first demonstrated planetary defense technique in history. Europe's Hera mission now arrives to survey the aftermath in detail: the crater DART left, Dimorphos's internal structure, and data that will determine whether this kind of kinetic impact could reliably be scaled up to protect Earth from a genuinely dangerous asteroid.
BepiColombo — finally arriving at Mercury
After an eight-year journey using multiple gravity-assist flybys to shed enough speed to be captured by the Sun's nearest planet, the joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission deploys two separate orbiters to study Mercury's surface composition, thin exosphere, and unusually strong magnetic field for a planet its size.