Author: The New York Times / Source: New York Times
It was a busy year for space, full of launches, goodbyes, astronomical events and surprising discoveries. With the timeline below, look back at this orbit around the sun from start to finish. Join us in 2019 when we’ll help you keep up with what is sure to be another busy year both on the ground and out in the void.
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January
The Zuma spacecraft was lost
The mysterious Zuma payload took off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Jan. 7: It seemed like an ominous start to the year when a SpaceX rocket made it off the launchpad, but its mysterious government payload appeared to have gone missing. Nearly 12 months and a lot of finger-pointing later, Zuma’s fate is not known.
The Lunar X Prize ended with no winner
Opher Doron, of Israel Aerospace Industries’ Space Division, with SpaceIL’s entry to the Lunar X Prize. The Israeli lander is scheduled to head to the moon in 2019.
Jan. 23: First announced in 2007, the Google-sponsored prize aimed at encouraging landings on the moon by privately-built robotic spacecraft with a $20 million jackpot for the winner. With a March 31 deadline looming, the prize announced none of its finalists would launch in time.
A Super Blue Blood Moon occurred
The super blue blood moon — say that ten times fast — over Athens, Greece.
Jan. 31: A triple lunar coincidence before your morning coffee was brewed. The pictures were nice, too.
February
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launched
The success of this launch gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Elon Musk’s dream of sending people to Mars.
Feb. 6: Three columns of flame carried the ambitions of SpaceX into the blue. The Heavy also sent a cherry-red Tesla sports car into a long orbit around the sun in an astounding marketing stunt. The Falcon Heavy may fly again in 2019 with a real commercial customer.
March
Stephen Hawking died at 76
Stephen Hawking in 2007.
March 14: As The Times’s Dennis Overbye put it in the obituary, Dr. Hawking “roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity.” Later in the year, the cosmologist’s final paper dwelled on how to escape from a black hole.
April
China’s Tiangong-1 space station crashed
A radar image of the Tiangong-1 space lab at a height of about 170 miles above Earth.
April 1: China lost control of its first space station a couple of years ago, and the question of when and where it would land was a source of uncertainty for months. In the end, it touched down in an area of the Pacific Ocean with no one but the fish to witness the splash.
The TESS spacecraft launched
NASA’s TESS spacecraft will spend two years searching the sky for nearby alien worlds.
April 18: As it orbits Earth and the moon, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will hunt for planets circling distant stars. In September it returned its first survey of one patch of sky containing 73 stars that planets might orbit.
The Senate confirmed NASA’s new administrator
April 19: In an eventful party-line vote, Jim Bridenstine, an Oklahoma congressman, was confirmed as President Trump’s pick to head the American space agency. It marked NASA’s longest-ever period with no confirmed leader (NASA’s terrestrial counterpart, NOAA, still lacks a confirmed administrator).
Astronomers released a new Milky Way map
Gaia’s all-sky view of the Milky Way, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars.
April 25: Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission launched in 2013, the three-dimensional map of the Milky Way is the most detailed survey ever produced of our home galaxy.
May
Vapor plumes were found to have erupted from Europa
May 14: The ice-encrusted moon of Jupiter with a global ocean flowing underneath its surface has long been an enticing target in the search for extraterrestrial life. Scientists made their discovery by looking back at data collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft during a 1997 flyby. Take Europa for a spin and see where the plume was detected below:
A global dust storm covered Mars
Images made by NASA’s Curiosity rover of the Gale Crater’s rim on June 7 and 10 of a global dust storm.
May 30: Dust storms are seasonal on Mars, but this one was giant and long-lasting. One result was that NASA’s Opportunity rover ran out of battery power and has been quiet ever since. The agency is still hoping to re-establish contact.
June
Some building blocks of life are identified on Mars
A self-portrait by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover in June.
June 7: Data from NASA’s Curiosity rover let scientists confidently identify organic molecules on the red planet used and produced by living organisms (although it is possible for such substances to be produced in chemical reactions that are not biological).
Trump ordered the creation of a Space Force
June 18: President Trump said he would direct the Pentagon to establish a sixth branch of the armed forces dedicated to protecting American interests in outer space. While the proposal initially gained some political support, its future is uncertain as Democrats take a majority in the House of Representatives next year.
July
Cosmic rays were traced to their source for the first time
An artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole sending a narrow high-energy jet of matter into space.
July 12: Astronomers announced that a neutrino first detected in Antarctica had been linked to a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy, some 4 billion light-years from Earth. The finding was expected to help future detections of high-energy particles form space.
A watery lake…
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