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- Arguably the biggest story in space for 2020 was the return of humans being transported to space from US soil. It wasn't just that astronauts lifted off from the US for the first time since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, it was also that the mission didn't feature a traditional NASA spacecraft.
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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...
May 6, 2021 · If it left the Earth now, a spacecraft like the Voyager – which is currently exploring deep space just outside our solar system – would arrive in the year 75100.
- 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
Sep 24, 2020 · Aug. 17, 2022 — A mathematical model developed by space medicine experts could be used to predict whether an astronaut can safely travel to Mars and fulfill their mission duties upon stepping...
Apr 8, 2020 · Strange particles observed by an experiment in Antarctica could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything is upside down. By Jon Cartwright
Dec 24, 2020 · A GLANCE AT SPACE IN 2021. If 2020 was the year of multiple missions launching to Mars -- China's Tianwen-1, the United Arab Emirates' Hope Probe and NASA's Perseverance rover -- then 2021...
Dec 28, 2020 · The year started with a literal bang. On Jan. 19, SpaceX blew up a rocket to demonstrate astronauts could escape its new spacecraft during a trip to orbit. It set the stage for a big year in ...
