2014 In Space: 11 Major Achievements
Comets and capsules grabbed top headlines, but robots racked up some firsts, the commercialization of space saw advances and setbacks, and the US prepared to resume manned space launches.
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Even as NASA worked on getting back into the business of launching men and women into orbit -- and perhaps soon beyond Earth orbit to asteroids and Mars -- robotic spacecraft seemed to be doing more real exploration in 2014.
This is not really a new thing. Sputnik beat Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn into orbit. Three years before the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, there were landings by the Soviet Luna 6 and the US Surveyor 1, both unmanned craft -- robots, though unsophisticated by today's standards.
Even in the mid-1960s, in the early days of the Cold War space race, unmanned spacecraft achieved flyby visits to locales like Venus and Mars that humans still aren't close to visiting. That gap only widened as unmanned craft began exploring the outer planets and their moons. On Saturday, NASA's New Horizon's spacecraft is expected to begin an exploration of Pluto and its moons. Mission planners hope to work in visits to yet more distant bodies in the Kuiper Belt, the region far from the sun where comets are born.
The robotic exploration of the year belonged not to NASA, but to the European Space Agency (though NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory played a supporting role). The ESA's Rosetta mission successfully put a lander on the surface of a speeding comet. While offering many lessons, the mission didn't go perfectly by any means. Harpoons were supposed to spear into the snowy surface of the tiny world and hold the spacecraft in place, despite the negligible gravity of a comet. When they failed to fire, the craft apparently bounced, maybe several times, but managed to land more or less upright, orient its antenna, and beam home pictures and instrument readings. As technologists, we could sympathize with the remote debugging challenge of understanding what had gone wrong and how serious it was.
Ultimately, the Rosetta lander, known as Philae, landed in the wrong orientation and in too much shadow to sustain the solar power needed to operate on the comet for more than a couple of days. However, hope remains that, as the comet comes closer to the sun, Philae may accumulate enough power to reboot and continue its mission.
Meanwhile, NASA is taking steps to ensure that its astronauts bound for the International Space Station will not have to hitch a ride with the Russians, even if the alternative is that astronauts will have to rent a ride instead. The first two commercial firms signed up to provide crewed launches to low Earth orbit are SpaceX, which is already sending unmanned payloads to the ISS, and Boeing, a more established aerospace firm that NASA judged to have the Right Stuff.
The goal is to make trips to Earth orbit routine, freeing NASA to focus on exploring further into space, possibly sending the first crew to Mars or an asteroid or maybe back to the moon, at least as a trial run. The goals keep shifting, and the funding is not as steady or the political will as constant as it was in the Apollo era, but the capability to send people beyond Earth orbit is coming into focus.
A new space capsule -- a crew module called Orion that looks like a throwback to Apollo, only larger, successfully lauched Friday morning. Though it's designed to carry a crew, Orion flew unmanned for this first launch, which is intended as a thorough test of all subsystems, including a new flight computer adapted from one used on commercial jetliners.
Click ahead for more of what 2014 brought us in space exploration.
(Above: From the approach to a comet landing. Image: ESA)
The first confirmed discoveries of planets outside our solar system, based on observations from the Kepler space observatory, began in 2009. But in 2014, the trickle turned into a flood thanks to new techniques in statistical analysis. On one day in February, the Kepler mission announced the discovery of 715 new worlds. The ESA's Hershel orbiting telescope has also gotten into the act.
The distant planets are too dim to be observed directly, so the strategy is to detect their shadows -- slight variations in the light from a star indicating that a planet is passing by.
(Above: ESA/NASA illustration of the mapping of an extrasolar planet)
While new space observatories are returning exciting results, the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, continues to perform. Even observations from years ago are turning up previously unknown information. In April, NASA announced that a forensic analysis of old images had turned up two planetary disks, the orbiting clouds of gas and dust that gather where planets are being formed.
That was something scientists were hoping to find when they first pointed Hubble at those stars between 1999 and 2006, after being tipped off from observations from another space telescope in the 1980s. No disks were detected at the time, but when the pictures were run through newer image processing software, including algorithms originally designed for facial recognition, researchers were able to unequivocally see the disks and even determine their shapes, according to NASA.
(Above: Enhanced Hubble images and illustrations of the corresponding planetary disks they represent)
In March, NASA released a series of images (above) of the breakup of an asteroid into as many as 10 pieces, as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. (The observations were actually recorded in 2013.) The disintegration was apparently not the result of a collision between two space rocks, which would have been more cataclysmic and sudden. Instead, scientists think it represents the final result of erosion caused by the radiation of the sun.
In January, the Herschel space observatory, another orbiting telescope, recorded the first definitive evidence of water vapor on Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system. Hershel is a European Space Agency mission that operates with support from NASA.
Though Ceres is large enough that it could also be considered a slightly underweight planet, many of these rocky bodies are more like the size of a mountain. Most orbit between Mars and Jupiter, but some cross closer to Earth, and one that connected with our planet is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Some of the mission plans NASA is considering involve visiting an asteroid, or perhaps capturing a small one to tow into Earth orbit for further study.
In 2012, the Curiosity Mars rover became famous for the seven minutes of terror it caused its mission controllers back at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was a risky maneuver in which a fiery atmospheric entry had to be followed by parachute deceleration, rocket-powered braking, and lowering of the lander to the surface via a crane from a hovering platform. This all happened too far away for any human intervention or course corrections, so by the time folks back home learned whether the lander had succeeded or crashed, it was all over.
The landing succeeded, and since then Curiosity has conducted its mission of exploration in a less nerve-wracking fashion. In June, it beamed home this selfie to celebrate having spent a full Martian year, or 687 Earth days, on the surface.
In September, Curiosity reached Mount Sharp, which NASA describes as "a Mount-Rainier-size mountain at the center of the vast Gale Crater and the rover mission's long-term prime destination."
Curiosity is doing well, but its older sibling Opportunity is exceeding all expectations. The twin Spirit and Opportunity landers arrived on Mars in 2004 and were expected to operate for about three months. Instead, they lasted for years. Though Spirit went offline in 2010, Opportunity continues to rove.
In July, NASA announced that Opportunity had set a new off-Earth driving record, having traveled more than 25 miles in its slow, methodical progress across the terrain surrounding its landing site. The previous record was set by the unmanned Russian Lunokhod 2 lunar rover, which traveled about 24.2 miles back in 1973.
(Above: A map of Opportunity's journey to date)
While the new Orion capsule is reminiscent of Apollo, NASA's Space Launch System, currently under development, is the new Saturn V -- a booster rocket stack powerful enough to lift heavy payloads and send them on their way for deep space missions.
The SLS is not ready yet -- the first test flight of Orion will pair it with a Delta IV rocket, an older design -- but NASA issued progress reports throughout the year, including the completion of a design review and the creation of a 170-foot-tall, 178-foot-wide welding tool that will be used in the construction of the core stage of the SLS.
(Above: Artist's conception: NASA/MSFC)
October turned out to be a tough month for commercial space flight and a particularly tragic one for Virgin Galactic, the Richard Branson venture intended to capitalize on interest in space tourism. Virgin has yet to make it into orbit, but it was working up to that goal during a test flight over the Mojave Desert when its rocket plane tore itself apart. The cause: a "feathering system" meant to control its descent deployed prematurely, while the craft was accelerating. One of the co-pilots was killed, and the other parachuted to safety.
Earlier in the month, an unmanned rocket operated by Orbital Science Corp. that was supposed to carry supplies to the International Space Station exploded on launch.
(Above: National Transportation Safety Board investigators inspect the wreckage from the Virgin Galactic crash site)
Commercial spaceflight also made significant advances in 2014. Both Orbital Science and SpaceX have been sending unmanned cargo ships to the International Space Station for the last couple of years, and this year SpaceX unveiled a version of its Dragon spacecraft intended to carry a crew. Boeing also has a contract to begin ferrying astronauts to the ISS within the next few years.
SpaceX scored another first by returning a scientific cargo to Earth, as the only commercial spacecraft now flying that's capable of carrying significant cargo not only up to but also down from orbit.
(Immediately above: The unmanned Dragon leaving the ISS. Top: Unveiling of the Dragon crew capsule)
November's comet landing was a big step after a long journey. The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, launched in 2004, spent a decade maneuvering through a series of gravity-assist maneuvers that allowed it to match speeds with a comet plunging toward the sun and then dispatch a lander to the surface.
That wasn't the only big comet news of November, when a constellation of ESA and NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars sent back observations of a close pass of a comet through the fringes of the Martian atmosphere.
(Immediately above: Artist's concept of a comet's encounter with Mars, via NASA/JPL. Top: Images from the Philae lander, ESA)
The first unmanned test flight of Orion, NASA's new space capsule, could be the beginning of bigger things for manned space flight, which has been stuck in low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s.
Orion successfully completed its Dec. 5 test mission, traveling 3,604 miles from Earth, making two orbits, and returning to splash down in the Pacific Ocean four-and-a-half hours later.
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