Artemis II put human spaceflight back in the headlines, but the mission pipeline behind it is stacked with spacecraft that deserve more attention than they get. Between now and 2028, six missions across five space agencies are approaching milestones that will produce the first samples from a Martian moon, the first close-up survey of a deflected asteroid, the first spacecraft inside a permanently shadowed lunar crater, and the widest infrared survey of the universe ever attempted.

Most of these missions get reduced to one-line summaries that miss important details. Some popular accounts have gotten basic facts wrong, confusing launch dates, overstating capabilities, or failing to mention the engineering problems that changed timelines. What follows is a closer look at what each mission actually involves and where things stand today.

Chang’e 7

China’s next lunar mission is the most ambitious robotic landing attempt anyone has planned for the Moon’s south pole. Chang’e 7 consists of four separate vehicles: an orbiter, a lander, a rover, and a mini-hopping probe designed to descend into permanently shadowed craters where temperatures drop below -230 degrees Celsius. The hopping probe is the novel element. No spacecraft has ever operated inside a permanently shadowed crater on the Moon, and the engineering challenges are significant: the probe must function without solar power, in temperatures that turn most electronics brittle, while drilling into regolith and analyzing it with a mass spectrometer.

The spacecraft arrived at the Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island in early April 2026 aboard an Antonov An-124 cargo aircraft. Launch is planned for the second half of 2026 on a Long March 5 rocket.

The scientific target is water ice. Multiple orbital missions have detected hydrogen signatures in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole, but no mission has confirmed ground-level water ice in situ. Chang’e 7’s hopping probe carries the Lunar Soil Water Molecule Analyzer (LUWA), which will drill for samples, seal them, heat them, and run the vapor through a mass spectrometer. If it finds what the orbital data suggests is there, the implications for future lunar bases are substantial: water ice can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, providing both rocket propellant and breathable air.

Some descriptions of this mission call it a “mini rocket-rover,” which undersells it. The rover is a separate vehicle from the hopping probe, and neither one is a rocket in any conventional sense. The hopping probe uses a thruster to make short ballistic hops between shaded areas, more like a powered grasshopper than a rover.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Roman is the mission most likely to change the shape of observational astronomy in the next decade. NASA completed construction of the telescope in November 2025, integrating the two major spacecraft segments at Goddard Space Flight Center. The observatory is now in its final testing phase, with launch planned for no later than May 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Internal schedules suggest the team is tracking toward a launch as early as fall 2026, though NASA has not publicly committed to the earlier date.

The telescope carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same diameter as Hubble’s, but its Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera with a field of view roughly 200 times larger than Hubble’s equivalent. Each Roman image will capture a patch of sky larger than the apparent size of a full moon. In practical terms, Roman can survey the same volume of space in a few months that would take Hubble decades.

Roman is often described as “Hubble but with 100x the field of view.” That is directionally correct but understates the actual number (200x wider field of view) and misses the more important point: Roman operates in the near-infrared, not visible light, which means it will see through dust clouds that block Hubble’s view and observe objects at much higher redshifts. It is a fundamentally different kind of telescope, not just a wider Hubble.

Roman’s science program centers on two questions. The first is dark energy: by surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies and thousands of supernovae, Roman will measure how the expansion of the universe has changed over time, testing whether dark energy is a cosmological constant or something more dynamic. The second is exoplanets: the Coronagraph Instrument, a technology demonstrator, will attempt to directly image giant exoplanets by blocking the light of their host stars. If it works, it will prove the coronagraph concept for future missions designed to image Earth-like worlds.

PLATO

ESA’s PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars mission is the exoplanet hunter that gets overlooked because it lacks a catchy comparison to an existing telescope. That is a mistake. PLATO carries 26 cameras on a single spacecraft, arranged to stare at the same patch of sky for years, watching for the tiny dips in brightness that betray a planet crossing in front of its star. The multi-camera design is the key innovation: by combining data from overlapping fields of view, PLATO achieves photometric precision that no single-camera system can match.

The mission is scheduled to launch in late 2026 or January 2027 on an Ariane 6 rocket, heading to the L2 Lagrange point. Its primary science goal is to find and characterize rocky planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars, with enough precision to determine the planet’s radius to 3%, its mass to 10%, and the age of its host star to 10%. That last number matters more than it might sound: knowing the age of a planetary system tells you how long life has had to develop.

Most summaries of PLATO focus on “finding small rocky planets,” which is true but incomplete. The mission’s asteroseismology capability, which uses stellar oscillations to determine the internal structure and age of stars, is arguably as scientifically significant as the transit detection. We have found thousands of exoplanets. We know the ages of very few of their host stars. PLATO will change that.

Martian Moons eXploration (MMX)

JAXA’s MMX mission will attempt something nobody has done before: land on Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons, collect at least 10 grams of surface material, and bring it back to Earth. The mission is scheduled to launch in late 2026 on Japan’s H-3 rocket, arrive at Mars roughly a year later, and return samples to Earth in 2031.

Phobos is a strange object. It is small (about 22 kilometers across), irregularly shaped, and orbits Mars at just 6,000 kilometers above the surface, closer than any other known moon orbits its parent planet. Its origin is debated: it may be a captured asteroid, or it may have formed from debris ejected by a giant impact on Mars. If the latter is true, Phobos samples could contain Martian material launched into orbit billions of years ago. That would make MMX a Mars sample return mission by proxy, arriving years before NASA and ESA’s dedicated Mars Sample Return campaign.

The spacecraft is a 4,200-kilogram vehicle with three modules: propulsion, exploration, and return. It carries two sampling mechanisms: a coring sampler that punches below the surface, and a pneumatic sampler that collects material from the top layer. The return capsule, about 60 centimeters in diameter, will land in Australia.

Quick summaries of MMX tend to describe it as a Phobos landing mission, which buries the lead. The sample return aspect is the mission’s defining feature. Landing on Phobos is a means to an end, and the end is getting material from the Mars system back to laboratories on Earth.

Hera

Hera sometimes shows up on “upcoming missions” lists as though it hasn’t launched yet. It has. ESA’s asteroid inspector has been in space since October 7, 2024, and as of April 2026 it is eighteen months into its cruise and on final approach to the Didymos binary asteroid system.

ESA announced in October 2025 that Hera was tracking to arrive at Didymos in October 2026, a month ahead of schedule. In March 2026, the spacecraft completed its second deep-space maneuver, burning 123 kilograms of hydrazine and changing its velocity by 367 meters per second.

What makes Hera more than a follow-up photo op is its instrument suite and architecture. The main spacecraft carries a laser altimeter for detailed surface mapping and a thermal imager for studying the asteroid’s physical properties. But the real innovation is the two CubeSats it will deploy: Milani, which will prospect the mineral composition of Dimorphos, and Juventas, which will perform the first radar sounding inside an asteroid, probing its internal structure. Both CubeSats will end their missions by touching down on the surface of Dimorphos, returning data on the contact dynamics.

This matters because DART proved you can change an asteroid’s orbit by hitting it. Hera will tell you what actually happened when you did. How much mass was ejected? What is Dimorphos made of? How did the internal structure respond to the impact? Without those answers, planetary defense remains a one-data-point experiment. Hera converts it into something closer to engineering.

BepiColombo

The oldest mission on this list launched on October 20, 2018, and still has not reached its destination. BepiColombo, a joint ESA-JAXA mission to Mercury, has spent nearly eight years on one of the most complex trajectories in interplanetary spaceflight: one Earth flyby, two Venus flybys, and six Mercury flybys, each one using the planet’s gravity to gradually slow the spacecraft enough to enter orbit.

The mission was supposed to arrive in December 2025. Then, in September 2024, ESA discovered that some of BepiColombo’s electric thrusters were delivering less power than expected. The flight dynamics team redesigned the final approach trajectory, adding one more Mercury flyby (the sixth, completed in January 2025) and pushing orbit insertion to November 2026.

BepiColombo carries two orbiters that will separate after orbit insertion. ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) will study the planet’s surface, composition, and geology. JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio) will investigate Mercury’s magnetic field and magnetosphere. Together, they will provide the most comprehensive study of Mercury ever conducted. The nominal science mission is one year, with a possible one-year extension.

Most coverage of BepiColombo correctly identifies it as a dual Mercury orbiter but fails to mention the thruster issues or the delayed arrival. That matters because BepiColombo’s complications are part of the story. Deep-space missions rarely go exactly as planned, and the engineering workaround that saved this one is worth understanding.

What Comes Next

These six missions involve five space agencies, four different destinations, and timelines ranging from “already in flight” to “launching later this year.” The back half of 2026 is going to be unusually busy.

If everything goes to schedule, the twelve months starting this summer will see more new destinations reached by active spacecraft than any comparable period since the early 2000s.

The details matter. Chang’e 7 is not just a rover mission; its hopping probe is attempting something unprecedented in a permanently shadowed crater. Roman is not just a wide-field Hubble; it is an infrared observatory designed to answer questions about dark energy. Hera is not a future launch; it has been in space for a year and a half. BepiColombo has been flying since 2018, and its arrival was delayed by a year because of thruster problems that required redesigning the final approach.

The space industry produces enough genuinely remarkable engineering that we do not need to oversimplify it. The real details of these missions are more interesting than the one-line summaries suggest.