Space missions in 2026: The Moon, Mercury, and the magnetosphere

From Moon missions to an expedition to Mercury, 2026 is shaping up to be an exciting year for space.

The first part of the year will see four astronauts orbit the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions of the late 1960s. The goal is to start testing the Orion spacecraft they will be flying in for an eventual human landing on the Moon.

All eyes will also be on China as the country brings astronauts to some of the Moon’s darkest corners in the summer, looking for clues that life could one day thrive there.

The European Space Agency (ESA) will be launching a mission to determine whether humans can defend Earth from asteroids. It will also launch a spacecraft to study the Earth’s magnetic field and launch a second in-orbit mission to Mercury.

Here are some of the space missions to watch out for in 2026.

2026 will be the “year of the Moon,” according to Monica Grady, professor of planetary and space science at the Open University in the United Kingdom.

There will be two major moon missions to watch this year. The first is the Artemis II mission, which will bring three American astronauts and one Canadian on a 10-day fly-by around the Moon.

The astronauts will test the Orion capsule’s critical life systems in preparation for a future human Moon landing.

The astronauts will travel approximately 4,700 miles (over 7,500 kilometres) beyond the far side of the Moon, from where they will be able to see the Earth and the Moon from the spacecraft’s windows.

Grady said this is an important moment because it will be the first time astronauts will be coming in proximity to the Moon since the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 70s.​

“It's a pretty big deal,” Grady said. “And this is ... hoped to be the final mission in preparation for landing astronauts back on the Moon.”

The other lunar mission creating buzz in 2026 is Chang’e 7, which will see Chinese astronauts study the Moon’s south pole.

​The mission will use a “hopper” spacecraft that will jump from sunlit areas to shadowed craters, searching for ice, water, or “volatile matter,” according to a press release.

Tang Yuhua, deputy chief designer of the Chang'e-7 mission, told state media that finding ice on the Moon’s south pole could significantly reduce the cost and time required to bring water from Earth for longer-duration missions to Mars and beyond.

China hopes that the mission will lead to several technological breakthroughs, such as using intelligent robots to survey the Moon’s harsh polar regions.

It’s also a moment for China to strengthen international relationships. Beijing said the Chang’e 7 mission will bring six payloads from Egypt, Bahrain, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, Thailand, and the International Lunar Observatory Association on its mission.

In the Autumn, ESA will investigate an asteroid in an attempt to improve the Earth-based defence response to any future objects that could collide with our planet.

ESA sent a rocket launcher in 2024 to investigate the impact site on an asteroid that the United States intentionally hit with a spacecraft back in 2022. The launcher will arrive at the crash site sometime in November to measure the size of the crater that the spacecraft left on Dimorphos.

The mission is a follow-up to NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which was launched towards Dimorphos, a small moon that orbits an asteroid called Didymos.

The goal of that mission was to understand how well launchers can protect humans from objects heading towards the Earth.

Scientists will be able to use the new data that comes back from ESA’s Hera mission to improve their asteroid-deflecting technology in case it's ever needed, ESA said.

European scientists are also holding a mission in April or May that will make detailed X-rays of the Earth’s magnetic atmosphere.

The magnetosphere protects Earth and everyone on it from gentle streams of charged particles, called solar wind, coming from the Sun.

“If it weren’t for the magnetosphere, life could not survive on planet Earth,” ESA said.

ESA’s Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) mission will send a 3-metre-tall spacecraft equipped with trackers and onboard antennas into orbit. The vessel will track how, where, and when the solar wind interacts with our planet.

The SMILE mission will help scientists understand a gap in the solar system and help keep technology and astronauts safe in the future, according to ESA.

During the mission, the craft will go as far as 121,000 kilometres above the North Pole, or one-third of the way to the Moon. It will also gather up to 45 hours per orbit of continuous observations of soft X-ray and ultraviolet light.

Also in 2026, orbiters from Europe and Japan will be pulled into Mercury’s atmosphere for the first time.

ESA says that Mercury is the least-explored planet in the galaxy because it is difficult to get objects that close to the Sun without being destroyed by its powerful gravitational pull.

The so-called BepiColombo mission has already sent some data back to scientists on multiple fly-bys it has done since its initial launch in 2018. However, 2026 will be the first time the spacecraft enter the planet’s orbit.

When the two orbiters are pulled in, they will be recording information about the planet’s magnetic environment and inner core. They will also make global maps of the planet’s surface.

The information that ESA will gatherfrom Mercury will “shed light on the history of the entire solar system,” the agency says.