At Mercury, MESSENGER's extended mission runs out in March, and rumor has it that NASA may choose to shut down an active spacecraft rather than spend the money to support another mission extension, despite the fact that MESSENGER has fuel enough for two more years of operations. You will likely be hearing about this from me again!

Nearer home, Juno will be flying by Earth on October 13, and you can hope to see some spectacular photos of Earth shot with JunoCam during the encounter. After that it'll take more than two more years to get to Jupiter.

On Mars, it is now Ls 239 of Mars Year 31, meaning that we're a bit more than midway between the southern vernal equinox and summer solstice. Curiosity (whose 2013 will comprise sols 144 to 499) is expected to spend January and February using the drill for the first time, then, finally, embark on the road trip to the base of the mountain. The trip will likely take the rest of the year. Opportunity (whose 2013 will comprise sols 3177 to 3533) will no doubt be noodling around on the rim of Endeavour crater all year. Jim Bell said in this week's hangout that the current thinking is that they'll wrap up at Cape York and drive south within a few months. Mars solar conjunction is in April; Jim said that'd make for a natural break between phases of Opportunity's mission. Of course, decisions are made tactically, and anything could happen!

At Saturn, Cassini will spend all of 2013 in a highly inclined orbit. That orbit has it spending most of its time on the sunward side of Saturn, until July, when back-to-back Titan flybys swing the apoapsis of Cassini's orbit to the opposite side of the planet. Throughout the year there will be eight targeted Titan flybys (used both for science and for tweaking the orbit), as well as one 1000-kilometer-altitude Rhea flyby in March.

As for everyone else: Venus Express, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, ARTEMIS, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Voyagers are in multiply-extended missions; there's no reason to doubt that they'll spend 2013 in normal mission operations. Akatsuki, Dawn, New Horizons, and Rosetta will spend all of 2013 cruising, cruising, cruising toward Venus, Ceres, Pluto, and comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, respectively. In fact, Rosetta will be totally silent all year, waking up from hibernation in January 2014. Finally, Deep Impact and ICE are still alive out there, awaiting further orders.

Following is a listing of all active missions, with links to places I use to check up on their status. It's a long list! It currently includes 13 spacecraft (11 missions) actively returning science data, plus 9 others in cruise or post-mission phases. Since this is the first time I've posted this list, there are likely some bad links; please do let me know about them and I'll fix them. Also let me know if there are good resources that I've missed!

Eight spacecraft actively returning science data and regularly posting images to the Internet: