The end of the year 2024 is approaching, marking another complete loop around the sun for our planet. So American scientific Here’s to celebrating the year with nine of our favorite space-related images. In case you’ve missed the trail, 2024 is a year full of exploration milestones, science breakthroughs and amazing sky displays which are worth reviewing. Here are some of our highlights of the year in the space.
Pursuing wholeness
A composite image shows a maximum 87 percent eclipse of the sun, as seen from Washington, D.C., on April 8, 2024.
Allison Bailey / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images
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North Americans were treated to a spectacular spectacle this April when a total solar eclipse swept across parts of Mexico, the US and Canada. Most of the rest of North America also experienced a partial solar eclipse. American scientific the workersof course, they were among the excited onlookers who set off on the path of totality, and reported on their incredible experiences—even though uncooperative clouds blocked their view of the phenomenon.
For everyone, the illusion was a reminder that we live in a solar system, governed by geometry Which produces a solar eclipse every 18 months or so somewhere on the planet. And for scientists, a a unique opportunity to see our sun in a way, we can only manage with the help of the moon.
But sky watchers in the lower 48 states will have to wait two decades for a similar opportunity: the next visible total solar eclipse It won’t happen to millions of people across the US until 2045.
Hubble sees the messy star
Hubble Space Telescope image of the binary star R Aquarii.
NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute, Margarita Karovska, Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble)
NASA’s darling Hubble Space Telescope It captured this amazing image of a binary star called R Aquarii, about 700 light-years from Earth, which regularly spews gas into its surroundings in an amazing light show. The binary’s main star is a red giant, more than 400 times the mass of our sun and whose brightness rises and falls every 390 days. Its companion is a small, dense white dwarf that strips gas from the star, causing regular explosions that shoot delicate filaments of glowing gas into space.
Farewell, Ingenuity!
A photo taken by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars shows the shadow of a rotor with a broken tip on January 18, 2024.
When NASA launched it Perseverance rover to Mars in 2020it was carrying a small passenger—called a four-pound chopper— ingenuity. The tiny chopper was a technology demonstration project that simply tested whether engineers could develop an aircraft that could fly through the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere. But Ingenuity did much more than the expected five sorties: the helicopter successfully completed 72 flights, lasting more than two hours in total and covering more than 10 miles of the Red Planet.
This year The invention was finally grounded when its navigation system was unable to track the terrain well enough to correctly gauge the helicopter’s landing, it crashed the vehicle. falling on its rotor tips and breaking one of them.
A new kind of spacewalk
Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman completed the first commercial spacewalk within it Polaris Dawn mission on September 12, 2024.
In September, a crew of four private astronauts made history when they adapted and opened up the SpaceX Dragon vehicle to all the hazards of space—well above the altitude of the International Space Station, no less—and two of them exited the craft. The resulting spacewalk marked a A key milestone in private spaceflight missionswhich until now had remained firmly within the safety of a closed hatch.
Mission, called Polaris Dawn, the activist was seen by millions—and now President-elect Donald Trump— select for NASA administrator—SpaceX engineer Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis venture into bold views of Earth. “Back home, we all have a lot of work to do,” Isaacman said in his departure. “But from now on, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”
To look for signs of life
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 14, 2024.
ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo
It was among NASA’s science missions that exploded this year Europa Clipper, headed for an icy moon of Jupiter. Scientists believe that this moon, called Europa, may have a habitable environment hidden beneath its shell in the global ocean, making it one of the most attractive destinations in our solar system.
The spacecraft faces a six-year journey, after which it will begin making nearly 50 close flybys of the moon, braving Jupiter’s brutal radiation belts. explore the frozen little world and the question of whether it is really appropriate for life. “It’s a move to explore a new class of objects, ocean worlds, that we didn’t even realize was a thing a couple of decades ago,” Robert Pappalardo, Europa Clipper’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview. with American scientific. “And we’re going to take a deep look at what this kind of world looks like, a kind of world that could be the most common habitat for life that exists, not only in our solar system but also in the galaxy.”
Stars shine in the dark matter telescope image
Close-up of M78’s star-forming region from a large image taken by the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope.
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing J.-C Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi (CC BY-SA 3.0 UPLOAD)
Last year the European Space Agency launched a new space telescope, Euclid, which is designed to study dark matter and dark energy. This summer Euclid published his the first fully calibrated science imagesan amazing look at the universe around us.
This particular image shows the star forming region known as Messier 78 or M78. Located 1,300 light-years from Earth, M78 is filled with warm hydrogen (pink-purple in this picture) and dust (reddish brown). Images like these can help scientists decipher how stars grow and how they affect the space around them, and Euclid is expected to collect observations for at least another five years.
The aurora paints the skies
An amazing aurora seen outside Las Vegas on May 11, 2024.
David Becker/ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy Stock Photo
Usually, northern lights They are limited to latitudes near the North Pole, as the name suggests. (Also, the southern lights tend to be near the South Pole.) But this year the sun has been particularly busy, reaching the maximum period of its 11-year cycle of activity. Our star has sent massive amounts of radiation and charged plasma into space. Some of these explosions have reached Earth, with surprising results: auroras as far south as Florida and India.
The the best shows of the year were in Mayafter the sun produced 82 “prominent” solar flares and half a dozen plasma bursts, or coronal mass ejections, in the days leading up to the aurora. Scientists expect higher levels of solar activity to continue in the new year, so 2025 could be a good year. also amazing displays.
The most exciting rock on Mars
Close-up image of the Martian rock “Cheyava Falls” captured by the Perseverance rover on July 18, 2024.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent another busy year exploring the Red Planet. This year was one of his most interesting discoveries The unusual rock that mission scientists named “Cheyava Falls”. Located in a long dry river valley in Jezero Crater on Mars, an area that Perseverance has been investigating since landing.
Cheyava Falls is a striated rock about the size of a coffee table, and its reddish streaks are decorated with dark-edged, light-colored “leopard spot” patches. NASA scientists believe that the dark rims may contain iron phosphate, a mineral that microbes can use as food, and that the rocks generally contain organic or carbon-based molecules. All that said, it’s interesting evidence of possible ancient microscopic life. “Cheyava Falls is the most amazing, complex and important rock Perseverance has yet investigated,” Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, said on July 25. NASA statement reporting the discovery.
Perseverance has collected a sample of the rock that scientists hope a future mission will be able to return to Earth for more detailed analysis.
The James Webb Space Telescope highlights young stars
A James Webb Space Telescope image of the star-forming region NGC 604.
NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope has also been hard at work throughout 2024. One surprising result is the image above, which comes from the spacecraft’s instrument. Near infrared camera. It shows the star-forming region known as NGC 604, which is part of the Triangulum galaxy 2.73 million light-years from Earth. In the image, carbon-rich polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons appear bright orange. Cooler molecular hydrogen, which fuels star formation, appears in deeper red, while ionized hydrogen appears in white and blue.
