Many wonderful things! In 2004, the Cassini spacecraft will arrive at Saturn. Its Huygens probe will descend through the atmosphere of Titan and tell us many new things about that mysterious satellite. The MESSENGER mission will arrive at Mercury and complete its extensive mapping mission. The BeppoColombo mission from ESA will drop a lander onto Mercury and give us surface and seismographic measurements. Mars will have been studied by a new generation of landers and rovers to uncover what the below-ground landscape looks like and perhaps actual traces of water. The NASA Stardust comet sampler will have returned to Earth a sample of an actual comet, and its penetrator will have made a permanent crater on comet Wild 2 to examine its surface rigidity and composition. There will probably be nearly 100 additional planets beyond our solar system to marvel at, and perhaps one or two more transits from which to get the atmospheric chemistry of these distant worlds. The SIRTIF infrared telescope will have been in operation for three years and returned detailed images of the first generations of stars in the universe. Astronomers have only recently been able to investigate astronomical objects the way they appear at all of the important electromagnetic wavelengths. Plate 14 shows what such a composite image looks like, and how much more information can be extracted from the 'images' of astronomical objects at other wavelengths. In a different, but critical, direction of research, in five years or so, the high-energy physics community will have a new accelerator online, the LEP II in CERN, which will continue the search for the Higgs Boson and extra-dimensions. The Planck mission, a follow-up to WMAP, will probe the cosmic microwave background at even higher resolution and reveal more details about the Big Bang.
