- 2983 - SPACE - news stories in the year 2020?
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| Mars Landing |
------------------------- 2983 - SPACE - news stories in the year 2020?
- The year 2020 brought one more tragedy besides the Corona virus with the collapse of the aging Arecibo observatory, leaving Earth a little more vulnerable to space rocks and astronomers are wondering what’s next.
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- There are a few good things we can reflect on: There were the ripples we felt from a collision between black holes so big they shouldn’t exist. And, astronomers also found another blackhole sitting just 1,000 light years away, the closest yet. The “InSight” probe sensed tremors from Marsquakes, and the Hubble Space Telescope turned 30 while I turned 80.
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- “SpaceX” finally sailed through the final stages of NASA’s commercial crew qualification program, and in May it flew astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time. Six months later, it did it a second time.
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- These flights were the first crewed spaceflights to take off from US soil in nearly a decade, and SpaceX’s ‘Crew Dragon” capsule is the fifth human-rated spacecraft in US history, after Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle.
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- SpaceX is also the first private company to develop the capability to fly people into space, and it doesn’t intend to stop with NASA astronauts. In the coming years, we may see space tourism finally take off.
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- On a far more distant note astronomers found “phosphine” on Venus and then lost it. Astronomers studying the clouds of Venus announced the discovery of trace amounts of phosphine, which on Earth is belched out by volcanoes and some organisms.
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- The find caused quite a stir, but, the excitement soon turned to confusion as other astronomers failed to verify the detection. Perhaps next year will bring a clearer picture of what chemicals are and aren’t drifting through Venus’s upper atmosphere.
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- Another major astronomical effort of the last decade has been cataloging and identifying the origins of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), blasts of radio waves from deep space that last for just milliseconds.
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- Theories for these bursts included neutron star collisions, the dramatic demise of balls of exotic matter, and even aliens pushing giant spacecraft around the universe with mightier laser beams. The far-off bursts seemed to appear largely at random, making it hard to pin down any one theory.
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- That all changed in 2020. Researchers detected a complicated pattern in the repetitions of one bursting source, giving valuable hints about its size and environment. Then one went off in our very own Milky Way. Observations tied the blindingly bright burst to a known source for the first time, a super magnetic neutron star known as a “magnetar“. (I have several reviews about magnetars available on request)
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- Our nearest star, the Sun has prominence in the sky but hard to see at night when most of astronomy is done. It makes it easy to forget that there’s a lot researchers don’t know about our nearest star.
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- In 2018, NASA’s “Parker Solar Probe” got closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft has before, and this year the golden age of “heliophysics” continued. In February, the European Space Agency launched its “Solar Orbiter“, which won’t get quite as close as Parker, but carries both cameras to study the star’s surface and instruments to feel the solar wind.
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- The world’s largest solar observatory, the “Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope“, also released its first data. The facility is already using its massive magnifier to take a close look at sunspots, and its observations may someday lead to better forecasts of space weather.
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- The US space agency launched a major robotic mission to Mars over the summer. Its crewed exploration program continued to race toward its goal of getting humans to the moon this decade with the “Artemis” program.
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- NASA announced that water molecules ever-so-slightly moisten all parts of our natural satellite, even the sunny parts. It would be pretty tough to turn that “H^2O” into a bottle of water, but the discovery raised hopes that additional deposits might be found so that future astronauts may not have to bring all their water from home.
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- Two robotic spacecraft have capture pieces of asteroids. The hope is to bring two little bits of space back to Earth. A Japanese probe named “Hayabusa 2“, which spent a year exploring the asteroid “Ryugu“, returned to Earth and dropped off precious milligrams of pristine rocks and dust dating back to the early days of the solar system. It was the second time after the original “Hayabusa 1” that humans collected asteroid fragments and brought them home.
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- And more asteroid dust is on the way from the NASA’s “OSIRIS-Rex” mission that just wrapped up its two years at the asteroid Bennu. The visit culminated in a daring maneuver to scoop up a sample from the asteroid’s surface in October.
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- The move ended up being a bit too successful, overstuffing the spacecraft with alien dirt so much that it couldn’t fully shut the sample’s container. But NASA engineers managed to securely stow the cargo, at least a handful about the size of a bag of M&M’s worth of asteroid for the long flight home.
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- OSIRIS-REx will return its sample to Earth in 2023, which will hopefully be a better year for planetary scientists, as well as the rest of us. Happy landings!
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January 17, 2021 SPACE - news stories in the year 2020? 2982
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--------------------- --- Sunday, January 17, 2021 ---------------------------
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