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- This year alone, two spacecraft grabbed precious samples from asteroids, human spaceflight saw a new spacecraft, NASA astronaut Christina Koch set a new record for longest duration spaceflight made by a woman and SpaceX took major leaps forward in commercial spaceflight with the first commercial crewed launches.
www.space.com/biggest-spaceflight-stories-of-2020
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Dec 22, 2020 · Science offers clues to why it feels like all of the above. Fourteen thousand years ago, a star called Vela died. Its core collapsed first and then, in a violent burst, propelled the shattered...
- 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
- Coronavirus affects space science. Related Stories. — The 10 biggest spaceflight stories of 2020. — Here's what we learned about aliens in 2020. — The rockets we lost in 2020.
- Iconic Arecibo Observatory collapses. This year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) said farewell to the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico after two major cable failures led to the radio telescope's collapse.
- A boom in sample return missions. A new "golden age" of sample retrieval missions is here. In October 2020, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu successfully stowed away pieces of the space rock to bring to Earth.
- China analyzes weird substance on moon's far side. Chinese scientists published an analysis of a strange substance they detected on the far side of the moon.
Dec 28, 2020 · While 2020 was a difficult year around the world with the challenges that have come with the coronavirus pandemic, space continued to reach new heights.
Dec 24, 2020 · CNN — This year has been a tough one no matter where you live in the world, but discoveries beyond our planet and dazzling images of the cosmos provided a bright spot in 2020. Astronauts...
Dec 14, 2020 · Looking back on 2020, space turned out to be a relative bright spot in a particularly dark year. Boosted by government contracts and increased demand in some sectors, the private space...
Dec 22, 2020 · What happened in space exploration in 2020? I review of some of the major headlines from space exploration this year with big implications for science
