pumpkin colored
On Jan. 14, 2005, after seven years in space—including two slingshots around Venus, one around Earth and another around Jupiter—the European Space Agency’s Cassini/Huygens mission successfully landed the Huygens probe on Saturn’s moon Titan, the first human craft ever to penetrate the mysterious moon’s heavy smog.

Titan has long captured the imaginations of planetary scientists, partly because its hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere was thought to resemble that of early Earth and thus make it one of the solar system’s better bets for life. No life has yet been found, but the topography photographed by Huygens is amazing: forms that look like lakes (presumably methane), shorelines, deep drainage ditches, volcanoes, rain clouds, craters, dune fields and pumpkin-colored rocks and sky. Like the images of Martian desert sent back by NASA’s rovers, one can’t help but be struck by a sense of familiarity. These forms and patterns, though distant, cold and exotic, are Earth-like.

Or maybe rocks just speak a common language, all throughout space.

Unfortunately, scientists initially received only about half as much data as they’d hoped, due to the failure of one of two communication channels that Huygens was meant to use to send data to its mothership Cassini. Cassini managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were given an incorrect instruction set by the European Space Agency team, which led to the malfunction.

“Space does not forgive stupid mistakes, and we made a stupid mistake. I take full responsibility,” said Jacques Louet, head of science projects at the European Space Agency.

Part of the data lost in the malfunction was subsequently retrieved by a network of radio telescopes here on Earth that had been able to pick up some of the transmission directly from Huygens, bypassing the Cassini relay.

The Cassini craft, which remained in orbit around Saturn, continued to send back striking pictures all year of the moons Phoebe, Rhea, Dione, Iapetus, Tethys, Mimas, Hyperion and Enceladus, as well as Saturn itself. Saturn’s rings were found to clump and kink and shift, a new moon was discovered down amongst the F ring, Enceladus turned out to have an atmosphere, and mountains were seen on Iapetus, to name just a few of Cassini’s revelations about the Saturn system.

Get some scissors and glue and build your own Cassini spacecraft out of paper by downloading this PDF from NASA: www.nasa.gov/pdf/59403main_model_challenging.pdf.

comets, asteroids and other ill omens
On July 4, NASA’s 820-pound Deep Impact impactor probe collided with comet Tempel-1 at approximately 23,000 mph. On purpose.

The mission was to study the inside of a comet by blasting a hole in the side of Tempel-1 and watching what came out. This was done with great success, as a tremendous plume of debris was ejected by the crash, vaporizing the impactor while a nearby observation craft watched.

The collision also produced a huge flash of light from inside the comet.

“You can not help but get a big flash when objects meet at 23,000 mph,” said Deep Impact co-investigator Dr. Pete Schultz of Brown University. “The heat produced by impact was at least several thousand degrees Kelvin, and at that extreme temperature just about any material begins to glow. Essentially, we generated our own incandescent photo flash for less than a second.”

The Japanese, who make the most ineffably sad spaceships, did not have such a smooth time with their craft Hayabusa and its mission to the potato-shaped asteroid Itokawa.

The ion-drive craft was meant to deploy a micro-lander called MINERVA, then go on to land on the asteroid itself, collecting samples for return to Earth in 2007. After reaching the asteroid, however, the mission experienced anomalous signals, delays, the failure of the micro-lander and a botched landing attempt by the mother ship.

Finally, the cursed-but-plucky Hayabusa landed on Itokawa, fired a projectile into the asteroid’s surface, and collected samples, only to then experience shuddering which forced an engine shutdown.

While the mission has not been abandoned, their inability to get the craft out of safe mode has caused flight engineers to postpone its return to Earth until the next return-flight window, in another three years.

the martian chronicles
When NASA’s twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, first bounced to a standstill on the red planet at the beginning of 2003, each had a target mission length of 90 days. Almost two years later, both craft are still rolling across the Martian landscape, still sending back data and still responding to commands from Earth.

Let’s say that again: Spirit and Opportunity have been exploring the surface of Mars for two years. It may be the most remarkable feat of interplanetary exploration that we have ever accomplished.

Opportunity has traveled four miles and sent back 58,000 pictures; Spirit has traveled three miles and sent back 70,000 pictures. They’ve explored hills and craters, bedrock and sand dunes, photographed dust devils and wispy clouds, all the while poking, prodding, sampling and transmitting back home. They have found compelling evidence for the past existence of abundant water on Mars, possibly even shallow, salty seas.

While it was initially thought that the rovers would be stopped by dust building up on the solar panels, engineers are delighted that gusts of wind have been periodically cleaning off the panels, boosting their yield. It’s now thought that mechanical failure will bring the end of the stalwart machines, and signs of that are looming as a broken motor coil recently limited the use of Opportunity’s robot arm. In the meantime, the rover teams continue to plot new courses for the machines. Opportunity is currently headed for a half-mile-wide depression called Victoria Crater, and Spirit is leaving the Columbia Hills for a distant, rugged area the team is calling “The Promised Land”

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, currently in orbit around Mars, has also been busy. Hot on the rovers’ water trail, Mars Express images seems to show evidence of a frozen sea just 5 degrees north of the Martian equator, as well as a large water ice patch in a crater near the martian north pole.

The High Resolution Stereo Camera sent back images of raft-like plates in an 800 by 900 kilometer area that bear a striking similarity to ice packs on Earth. Since their proximity to the equator should have caused the plates to melt long ago, one theory is that they are shielded by a layer of volcanic ash.

The ice crater at the north pole is about 35 kilometers wide; the ice caps normally seen on Mars are carbon dioxide.

NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft may have found the remains of the lost British probe Beagle 2. A crater near the intended 2003 landing site of the probe has features consistent with impact damage, although the probe itself is too small to show up in the pictures.

Looking toward the future, NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter launched successfully on Aug. 12 and is due to arrive at Mars in early 2006. The orbiter will study Mars from low orbit, and it is hoped that it will provide a huge amount of data about the martian surface, martian atmosphere, martian weather and martian gravity.

the vision thing
After two years of shuttle program downtime, the Space Shuttle Discovery finally returned to flight in July. Unfortunately, the 14-day mission was marred first by foam-shedding problems during liftoff and then by the discovery of damage to the underside of the shuttle in the form of protruding gap fillers in the heat shield. Normally tucked in between the heat shield tiles, the loose bits of material had to be removed by hand in the first-ever in-flight external shuttle repairs.

But it’s the foam shedding during liftoff that has postponed future shuttle launches indefinitely, since a similar problem caused the catastrophic damage to Columbia in 2003.

Repair missions for the beloved Hubble Space Telescope have been cancelled, NASA’s budget has been trimmed, dependence on Russia’s space program continues and NASA’s new post-shuttle space initiative will be, in their own words, “building on the best of Apollo and shuttle technology,” culminating in something that looks like an oversized Apollo capsule. That may be good science, but it doesn’t inspire. Meanwhile, the Europeans have already launched their big new Ariane 5 rocket.

In the private sector, Virgin Galactic has announced that its first spaceport will be built in New Mexico. The $225 million facility will be home to Virgin Galactic’s upcoming fleet of five ships based on Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne design, and it will serve as the launch point for what the company hopes will become a booming space tourism industry.

Initial flights to sub-orbital space will cost $200,000. One hundred people have already paid the full amount in advance, and another 38,000 people have made smaller deposits.

Virgin Galactic also unveiled their new logo, based on an image of Sir Richard Branson’s iris.

X-Prize co-founder Dr. Peter Diamandis announced the creation of a new sport: rocket racing.

Run by the Rocket Racing League, the sport will feature special rocket planes designed by XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., which will race around a two-mile long loop track 5,000 feet in the air. Pilots will be able to determine their exact location on the airy course with detailed GPS information.

“The Rocket Racing League will inspire people of all ages to once again look up into the sky to find inspiration and excitement,” Diamandis said in a press release.

But the big news in private spaceflight continues to be SpaceX. Although they failed to achieve any launches in 2005, they came within a hair’s breadth of launching their first privately designed and built rocket, the Falcon 1, and signs are promising for an early 2006 launch from their new Kwajalein launch facility in the Pacific. The payload will be FalconSat-2, part of the Air Force Academy’s satellite program, designed to measure space plasma phenomena.

SpaceX boasts that the Falcon 1 rocket will be the first privately-developed rocket to reach orbit, that it will be partially reusable and that it will offer the lowest cost-per-flight to orbit of any launch vehicle.

Assuming the Falcon 1 goes well, plans for the Falcon 9 are already in the works. This is to be a massive rocket, capable of lifting 25-ton payloads into a variety of orbits. It’s scheduled to be available for launch in 2008.

The Falcon 9 is the evolution of the Falcon 5, originally intended to be the company’s second space vehicle. However, SpaceX decided to skip ahead and focus on a much larger-capacity vehicle sooner rather than later.

Among the Falcon 9’s capabilities will be resupply of the International Space Station and crew transportation.

It is the long-term goal of SpaceX, according to CEO and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, to make Mars colonization affordable.

Other space companies have big plans and rockets on paper, but we have a good feeling about SpaceX.

miracles, wonders and duds
• After five days in orbit, China’s second manned space flight came to a harmonious conclusion with a safe return to Earth on Oct. 17. Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng, the two taikonauts carried into space by Shenzhou VI, parachuted down into Inner Mongolia in the re-entry capsule without injury.

• Scientists using the Chandra X-ray Observatory may have found the universe’s missing dark matter.

By studying X-ray interference patterns coming from distant galaxies, astronomer Fabrizio Nicastro and his colleagues were able to conclude that massive clouds of baryons were floating between galaxies, absorbing the radiation. Assuming such clouds are typical throughout the universe, their mass would equal that of the long-theorized-but-never-proven-to-exist-before-now dark matter.

• After launch on June 21 from a Russian submarine in the Barents sea, The Planetary Society’s Cosmos-1 solar-sail craft failed to reach orbit due to a launch vehicle malfunction. Designed to be the first craft propelled by the sun’s light, Cosmos-1 was equipped with eight 50-foot long sails engineered to unfold after the craft achieved orbit. Unfortunately, according to Russian flight control, the failure of the Russian Volna launch vehicle kept the craft from ever reaching space, and instead propelled it right back into the Barents sea, possibly because the Volna’s stages never separated.

One way or another, we’d bet our lucky tooth that we haven’t seen the last of the Planetary Society.

• On a European Space Agency exobiology experiment, two different species of lichen were exposed to full vacuum outside a spacecraft for 14 days, including all the associated temperature fluctuations and cosmic radiation. Upon return to Earth, the lichen colonies were still alive and capable of photosynthesis.

Lichen are almost more like tiny ecosystems than organisms, since a lichen colony is composed of fungal and algal cells bound together in symbiosis. Their remarkable success in space adds credence to “interstellar seed” theories of how life may be able to be transmitted through space.

• In some circles, it’s common knowledge: at the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole with a mass of two million suns. It’s just hunkered down there, sucking everything in like a big fat spider.

 It’s another thing to see it, though, or, at least, to see a star whipping around the black hole in a very, very tight orbit, with a period of only 15 years. That’s a timeframe so short that a team of international physicists, led by members of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, were able to put together a video clip of the star’s movement-not a simulation, mind you, but a sequence of photographs from 1992-2002 showing this star orbiting a great and malevolent blackness. Check it out at www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/pr-17-02.html.

• Short gamma ray bursts—which, if strong enough, could wipe much of the life from the surface of the Earth—are now believed to be caused by the collisions of supermassive neutron stars and/or black holes.

The revelation comes from observations of just such a collision in a galaxy 2.9 billion light-years away, which researchers were able to watch this summer using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, The Hubble Space Telescope, the High-Energy Transient Explorer and a Danish telescope to boot. It was the first time that such a collision has been observed.

• There might be a tenth planet, or it might just be a Kuiper belt object, and it might have moons, but are they moons if it’s not a planet? Pluto may have two newly-discovered moons as well, but then again, is Pluto really a planet in the first place? Suffice it say, stuff is being discovered in the solar system at a thrilling rate.

COMING UP NEXT: After collecting particles from a comet’s tail in 2004, NASA’s Stardust craft is scheduled to return them to Earth on Jan. 15, 2006, touching down in Utah. If successful, it will be the first time that samples from a comet have ever been returned from space.