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- 2020 was a wild year. Astronomers kicked it off with the discovery of a distant galaxy group. Closer to home, they saw the Milky Way doing the wave and confirmed geologic activity on Mars. The star Betelgeuse underwent a strange and striking dimming event, while naked-eye Comet NEOWISE took our breath away.
www.astronomy.com/science/top-10-space-stories-of-2020/
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Dec 22, 2020 · 2020 was a time warp. Was it a year, a day, or a millennium? Science offers clues to why it feels like all of the above.
- Commercial Spaceflight
- The End of Arecibo
- Surveyor 2 Returns
- Back to The Moon
- To The Red Planet
- Sampling Asteroids
- Hello, Voyager 2
On May 30, 2020, a Crew Dragonspacecraft carrying astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket – all owned (or, in the case of the land beneath the launch tower, leased) by Elon Musk's SpaceX company. About 19 hours later, it autonomously rendezvouse...
Contrasting with the dawn of commercial spaceflight was a dramatic sunset for the Arecibo radio telescope, which suffered n surprise collapse in Puerto Rico. Once the world's largest single-dish telescope, a cable unexpectedly snapped in August, damaging the 1,000-ft (305-m) dish, and the instrument was then slated for dismantling after more struct...
There was also a curious reunion in 2020 when the Centaur rocket booster from the 1966 Surveyor 2 Moon mission temporarily returned to Earth orbit for a brief visit before heading off into deep space in March 2021. First thought to be an asteroid, its mass and orbit suggested that it was actually an empty rocket. By tracing its orbit backwards to i...
Meanwhile, NASA has been very busy as its Artemis program to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon ramps up. The largest rocket since the Apollo program made its debut on January 8 when the first of NASA's Space Launch System(SLS) deep-space booster rockets rolled out of the space agency's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The Bo...
We also saw more missions setting off for the planet Mars in 2020, including the first of a series of the most ambitious interplanetary missions to date. On July 30, NASA's Mars 2020mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the robotic Perseverance rover onboard. It may look like a more advanced version of the previous Curiosity rover, ...
2020 was also a momentous one for the study of asteroids. On October 20, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx moved in carefully and touched the asteroid Bennu, 205 million miles from Earth, where it used a burst of nitrogen to scoop up 2-oz (57-g) of regolith from the surface. Unfortunately, it did the job a little too well. The head of the sample collection device ...
Last but not least, 2020 was also the year when contact was reestablished with a true veteran of the Space Age. On October 29, NASA sent its first commands to the Voyager 2probe after a communications blackout lasting eight months. Launched 43 years ago and currently around 11.6 billion miles (18.8 billion km) from the Earth and counting, Voyager 2...
- david.szondy@gizmag.com
Dec 24, 2020 · A suite of studies revealed some of the genetic changes astronauts experience during long-term spaceflight, a crew had to handle a blood clot in space, and NASA astronaut Christina Koch set a new...
Dec 28, 2020 · 2020 has been a tough year down on planet Earth, with the coronavirus pandemic interrupting the usual business of humanity. With so much of the Earth’s population stuck at home for large parts...
Dec 28, 2020 · 2020 Was a Big Year in Spaceflight. Michael Roston From the Science Desk 🚀. Joe Rimkus Jr/Reuters. The year started with a literal bang. On Jan. 19, SpaceX blew up a rocket to demonstrate...
- Michael Roston
Feb 16, 2021 · 2020 was a wild year. Astronomers kicked it off with the discovery of a distant galaxy group. Closer to home, they saw the Milky Way doing the wave and confirmed geologic activity on Mars.
Dec 30, 2020 · For many reasons, 2020 may be a watershed year for society and science. Astronomers and space agencies spent the year managing the repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic. They also...
