More eyes in the universe, new RNA vaccines and Steve Aoki on the Moon: what surprises science can deliver in 2023

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Without needing to take out a crystal ball, science allows you to anticipate —to a certain extent— your future milestones.

Thanks to the fact that it is a highly planned work, founded on bricks that researchers and scientists are placing little by little, and with very expensive, long-term projects.

The greatest scientific achievements of 2022, for example, were the commissioning of the

Space Telescope and the achievement of efficient nuclear fusion, two milestones that had been worked on for decades.

Like those with RNA vaccines behind them (accelerated thanks to covid), particle physics laboratories or new space exploration projects that will feed scientific information to newspapers in 2023.

This planning allows us to venture some important scientific events and news that the year that has just begun will bring, in different fields of research.

moon exploration.

The rockets are burning, in the best sense of the expression.

2022 has ended up being, as we expected, the one that has registered the highest number of space launches in all of history: 180 successfully, according to the

count .

And 2023 will be another great year.

The Moon continues to be a priority geostrategic objective for the great space powers, especially the US and China, as NASA administrator Bill Nelson has just acknowledged: "It is a fact: we are in a space race."

The plans of the Americans are pending the new SpaceX rocket, Starship, which will have to test its ability to take people to the Moon in the coming months: it will probably have a first major test in March, a decisive step in the plans to have in 2025 a woman walking through our satellite.

And then there's the DearMoon project, launched by Japanese tycoon Yusaku Maezawa, who intends to use the Starship to go around the Moon with eight artists, including popular American DJ Steve Aoki.

The plan is to try this year, but it could be delayed.

High altitude flight test of the 'Starship SN8'.space X

There are more countries in the lunar race: the Japanese mission Hakuto-R, the Indian Chandrayaan-3, the

from the United Arab Emirates will have their leading role.

Search for extraterrestrial life.

We don't talk about whether there are aliens among us, although a bit too.

NASA has just launched a scientific team that will have its first report on UFOs, now called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), ready.

In addition, the SETI institute, in charge of searching for extraterrestrial life, launches its first major search campaign for intelligent life of the Cosmic project.

The European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the Juice mission in April in the direction of Jupiter's icy moons, such as Europa, candidates for harboring life in one of its oceans.

But it will not reach the Galilean satellites until 2031, so exciting results will have to be sought in other projects.

For example, the New Zealand private mission of Rocket Lab and MIT, which send a probe to Venus in search of signs of life.

However, these signals on other worlds can also be detected remotely, as with the

, which has just shown that it is capable of hunting habitable planets and of analyzing to the extreme the composition of the atmosphere of these exoplanets (those outside our solar system).

It would not be strange for this powerful space observatory to make great strides in this field in 2023.

Space study.

This year may mark an important step towards the asteroid mining gold rush.

probe

reached the asteroid Bennu in 2020

from which it took samples that it will bring to Earth in September, in order to analyze them in detail.

And also NASA launches this year, in October, the

probe , which intends to analyze for the first time a metallic asteroid to study its composition.

Illustration of what the metallic asteroid that will visit 'Psyche' may look like.NASA

And we will have new eyes looking at the universe.

astronomical observatory will be launched in Chile ,

with a very powerful camera that will make it possible to track new dangerous asteroids and study dark matter and dark energy.

That same objective will have the new telescope that will also be launched this year by ESA,

a 600 million euro device that will analyze thousands of galaxies.

In addition, China will put the

observatory in space in the same orbit as the Chinese Space Station, in order to carry out maintenance or improvement work.

And Japan will launch its Xrism mission to detect X-ray radiation from distant stars and galaxies.

Biomedicine.

Messenger RNA vaccines became world famous for getting us out of the tunnel of the covid pandemic, but initially they were developed for decades with another goal in mind.

For example, cancer, which is once again in the spotlight for this biomedical technology, after Moderna and Merck announced promising results in the preliminary trials of their vaccine against melanoma.

That initial joy will have to materialize this year, like that of the universal flu vaccine, successfully tested in mice.

Other diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis and genital herpes, are also on target.

Gene editing continues to make giant strides since the Crispr tool began to be used and its most sophisticated developments, such as the revolutionary genetic

, have this week demonstrated their ability to correct heart disease.

The use of the first Crispr-based therapy against blood diseases is expected to be authorized this year, although the main problem with these gene therapies continues to be the million-dollar price of the treatments.

In addition, the World Health Organization will publish an updated list of priority pathogens that may cause future outbreaks or pandemics, including the fearsome "Disease X," an unknown pathogen that could cause a new serious international epidemic.

The list is compiled by more than 300 scientists studying more than 25 families of viruses and bacteria, to set research roadmaps and guide the development of vaccines and treatments.

Aerial view of the facilities of the European Spallation Neutron Source in 2021.Perry Nordeng

Frontiers of physics.

At the end of 2022, nuclear fusion was tamed for the first time and this year these advances should be consolidated.

But above all, it will be necessary to reckon with the premiere of cutting-edge scientific facilities in the field of fundamental physics, such as the European Spallation Neutron Source (ESS), in Sweden, a project that will make it possible to study the structure of matter by generating intense beams of neutrons with the most powerful particle accelerator ever built.

In China, the JUNO neutrino detector (Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory) will be launched 700 meters underground to precisely measure the oscillation of these electrically neutral subatomic particles.

For gravitational waves, the MIGA project is launched, which will use ultracold atoms to detect these waves in space-time at frequencies lower than ever.

The largest X-ray machine on the planet, the LCLS in California, will also start up in 2023, which will allow the examination of atoms and molecules in unprecedented detail.

In their predictions for 2023, the magazines

and

also bet on other scientific news, such as the controversy over drugs to mitigate Alzheimer's, the search for the place that determines the jump to the Anthropocene, or advances in the knowledge of the genus

, our family.

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