First NASA Step On Journey To Mars Among 3 Major Space Events This Week

At least three major space events will take place this month in a dramatic escalation of humankind's quest to explore other worlds.

On Thursday, Dec. 4, NASA is scheduled to launch an Orion space capsule in the first step of its mission to send human beings to Mars.

Then on Dec. 6, NASA will send a wake-up call to a hibernating spacecraft called New Horizons when it makes in initial approach towards Pluto, which is scheduled to take place on Jan. 15. The spacecraft is expected to fly as close as 6,200 miles from the surface of Pluto on July 14, 2015 -- the closest human probe yet on the dwarf planet.

Sometime this week, a Japanese probe called Hayabusa 2 will rendezvous with an asteroid and hopefully bring rock samples back to Earth to study the composition of this celestial body in the hope of learning how life emerged on Earth. Asteroids and comets formed shortly after the creation of our Solar System some 4.5 billion years ago. Some scientists believe that these space objects were the ones that brought water to Earth when they collided with our planet.

Among these three space missions, the most significant appears to be the Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) that will send an unmanned Orion capsule zooming about 5,800 kilometers from Earth and then rocketing back to the planet at high speeds to test the capsule's heat shield, avionics and other systems.

No vehicle built for a manned space mission has been designed to travel that far. The launching also marks NASA's first step for sending a human team to a distant world since 1972 when the agency's last Apollo moon missions returned to Earth.

Barring any hitches, NASA plans to launch its first manned mission to Mars by 2021.

The Orion capsule will be lifted into space by a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket. However, future Orion missions will be carried by NASA's Space Launch System megarocket (SLS), which is still in development.

"I gotta tell you, this is special," said Bob Cabana, director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, during a press briefing last month. "This is our first step on that journey to Mars."

Meanwhile, the spacecraft New Horizons is heading to Pluto and is now currently 2.9 billion miles away from Earth.

New Horizons was launched in January 2006 atop an Atlas V rocket at a when Pluto was still considered as the farthest planet from Earth. Later that year, scientists voted to demote its status to that of a dwarf planet.

For the last nine years, the spacecraft has gone into hibernation several times to help conserve power and allow scientists to map its mission. Once awakened on Dec. 6, New Horizons will transmit radio signals that will reach the Mission's control center, located in Maryland, at 9 p.m. eastern time.

"This is really quite an epic journey," said Alan Stern, the lead investigator for the New Horizons mission from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "Three billion miles across the entirety of our planetary system, from the inner planets to the middle solar system to the third zone -- the Kuiper belt -- and for the first time. No voyage like this has been conducted since the epic days of Voyager, and nothing like it is planned again," Stern said.

The spacecraft is expected to produce high-definition imagery of Pluto and its surroundings, better than those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.