this space news retrospective has been collected throughout the year from press releases and articles in the space press, including space.com, Associated Press, Reuters and many others

Mars=water

On Jan. 3 at 11:35 p.m. EST, NASA's rover Spirit plummetted through the atmosphere of Mars and then bounced across the rocky surface, cushioned by a cocoon of airbags. On Jan. 24 the rover Opportunity followed suit with a landing on the far side of the red planet. Both rovers had 90-day mission plans.

Incredibly, both rovers are still operating today, almost a year later, and the information that they've sent back has fundamentally changed our understanding of Mars.

Opportunity touched down at the bottom of a shallow crater, perfect for studying the exposed Martian bedrock. "We have scored a 300-million mile interplanetary hole in one," said Dr. Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the science instruments on the rovers.

As soon as Opportunity rolled off its landing platform it discovered mysterious gray spherules lodged in the layered rocks surrounding the landing site. Dubbed "blueberries," the tiny spherules were eventually identified as hematite, a mineral known on Earth to form in the presense of water.

This evidence quickly led NASA scientists to conclude that liquid water had, in fact, once flowed on Mars, and by the end of March they were further convinced that water had taken the form of a standing lake or sea.

"We think Opportunity is now parked on what was once the shoreline of a salty sea on Mars," said Dr. Squyres.

Spirit had meanwhile been experiencing some communications problems, which were eventually tracked to a problem with the flash memory. By reformatting the memory, the rover was restored to full operation.

Having outlasted their original missions, the two rovers set out across the Martian surface for new destinations. Spirit struck out for the Columbia Hills, and Opportunity sought out a much larger crater called Endurance.

"We see the coarse hematite grains on the upper slopes and basaltic sand at the bottom," said Dr. Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, Tempe, speaking of Endurance crater. "Most exciting is the basalt signature in the layered cliffs." Basalt is volcanic in origin, but the thinness of the layers visible in the cliffs suggests they were emplaced some way other than as flows of lava, he said.

"Our working hypothesis is that volcanically erupted rock was broken down into particles that were then transported and redeposited by wind or by liquid water," Christensen said.

Spirit began to develop problems with one of its front wheels, but the rover team was able to minimize the problem by driving the rover backwards.

Spirit then found its own evidence of past water by analyzing the composition of the rock named "Clovis," and later through the discovery of goethite in the rock-strewn Columbia Hills, another mineral only known to form in the presence of water.

In orbit around Mars, The European Space Agency's Mars Express has detected tantalizing traces of methane in the atmosphere, and that there are regions where concentrations of methane and water vapor overlap. The spatial correlation between water vapour and methane could point to a common underground source. Cirrus-like water clouds have been photographed from the ground by Opportunity.

Far from finished, one of the solar-powered rovers has recently been experiencing mysterious boosts in power. NASA scienists believe that accumulated dust is somehow being removed from the solor panels, but are unsure as to how.

the race to sub-orbit

A possible excerpt from the history books that will be written about 2004:

Meant to stimulate development of commercial spaceflight technology, the Ansari X Prize was a $10 million purse that was to be awarded to the first team that:

a) Privately financed, built and launched a spaceship, able to carry three people to an altitude of 100 kilometers (62.5 miles)

b) Returned safely to Earth

c) Repeated the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks

On Apr. 1, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) issued the world's first license for a commercial sub-orbital manned rocket flight to Scaled Composites, builders of the experimental rocket plane SpaceShipOne, a mark of their significant lead in the race for the X Prize.

More than 20 teams registered for the contest, however, and while some of them were just entries on paper, others built rockets.

The Rubicon One, a rocket designed and built by Space Transport Corp., exploded shortly after takeoff on Aug. 9 and then fell into a nearby river when the parachute failed.

Canada's Arrow rocket successfully tested its parachute on Sat. Aug. 14 in a drop from 2,400 meters, safely landing its crew cabin in the waters of Lake Ontario after being dropped from a helicopter.

After unveiling their rocket on Aug. 5, the Canadian da Vinci Project announced that they would make their own attempt for the X Prize on Oct. 2, although they did not end up launching. The da Vinci Project's rocket was sponsored by Golden Palace.Com, an online casino, and the ongoing project has now been renamed "The GoldenPalace.com Space Program."

It was SpaceShipOne, however, that successfully made humanity's first civilian sub-orbital spaceflight on June 21 after launching from the Mojave Spaceport aboard its White Knight carrier vehicle, and by Oct. 4 the team had successfully completed their X Prize flights to win the $10 million.

Richard Searfoss, a former Portsmouth resident, was chief judge for the X Prize, and he announced the victory in a press conference. "I declare that the Mojave Aerospace Ventures has indeed earned the Ansari X Prize."

In the words of Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and sponsor of the SpaceShipOne program, "This flight begins an exciting new era in space travel. Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites are part of a new generation of explorers who are sparking the imagination of a huge number of people worldwide and ushering in the birth of a new industry of privately funded manned space flight."

And if you doubt the relevance or commercial viability of civilian sub-orbital spaceflight, then note that Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic signed a deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures to use that technology to build commercial spacecraft for space tourism. The Web site is already online at www.virgingalactic.com. From the Web site:

"Virgin Galactic will own and operate privately built spaceships, modelled on the history-making SpaceShipOne craft. These spaceships will allow affordable sub-orbital space tourism for the first time in our history.

Designs for the Virgin Galactic craft are progressing on a weekly basis at Rutan's base in Mojave, California and by early 2005 the final design for the maiden Virgin Galactic ship, the VSS (Virgin SpaceShip) Enterprise, should be signed-off. "

the good ship ISS

It has been a long year for the International Space Station. Dependent on the Russian space program ever since the U.S. shuttles were grounded, the ISS has been further plagued by mechanical problems and supply shortages this year.

After losing air for several weeks, Cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri and Astronaut Michael Foale, the crew of Expedition 8, found the source of the leak in mid-January, tracing it to a window hose after a painstaking five-day search with an ultrasonic leak detector.

In April, Kaleri heard a mysterious banging sound which had been heard previously in November 2003. Described as sounding like a tin can hitting the station, NASA mission specialists postulated that the sound may have been from an internal event involving a ventilation system, although this was never proved conclusively.

Shortly thereafter the crew of Expedition 8 traded places with the incoming crew of Expedition 9, Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and Astronaut Mike Fincke, whose Soyuz craft docked on April 21.

A day after they arrived, a critical gyroscope failed due to a malfunction of its power control system.

The June 24 spacewalk scheduled to fix the power problem was abruptly cut short when Fincke's oxygen tank began rapidly losing pressure. The problem was determined to be a switch that had not fully closed.

A successfull spacewalk followed on June 30, during which power was finally restored to Control Moment Gyro 2.

On Oct.16 Expedition 10 arrived, and Astronaut Leroy Chiao and Cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov took up residence on the station.

Shortly after their arrival, food supplies were noted to be depleting more quickly than anticipated. When supplies dipped below the 75-day mark in early December, evacuation plans began to be considered; however, the successful Christmas Day arrival of an unmanned Progress cargo craft delivering 2.5 tons of food, fuel, oxygen, and water restored supplies to a healthy level.

probes, etc.

In January, NASA's Stardust craft passed within 150 miles of comet Wild 2, taking photographs and collecting dust from the comet's tail to be returned to Earth.

Stardust-which was launched in February 1999-will not bring its cargo home until Jan. 15, 2006.

NASA's Gravity Probe B was successfully launched on Tuesday, April 20, aboard a Delta II rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Gravity Probe B was designed to test Einstein's general theory of relativity by measuring how Earth warps space-time, and how Earth's rotation further affects space-time.

The craft was designed to take measurements for another 16 months using four onboard gyroscopes. The gyroscopes are made with small quartz spheres, "the roundest objects ever made by man," according to NASA, and are 30 million times more accurate than any other gyroscopes ever built.

On July 15 NASA successfully launched the bus-sized Aura spacecraft from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. An atmosphere-monitoring satellite, Aura will attempt to determine if the earth's ozone layer is recovering, as well as look at climate change and the motion of pollutants through the atmosphere.

A scale model of the European Space Agency's new Phoenix shuttle design was successfully tested on May 9. The 23-foot-long, 1/6 scale model was dropped from a helicopter at 8,000 feet, from which height it glided to a computer-guided landing at a nearby Swedish runway.

On Aug. 3, NASA's Messenger craft launched for a 2011 rendezvous with the planet Mercury.

China has scheduled its second manned spaceflight for late 2005. It will be a two-person, five-day orbit which should allow for some experiments to be performed.

China is only the third country to independently launch humans into space.

There has also been talk of China's plans to go to the moon.

Brazil's space program is back on track with the successful flight of its first space rocket, a VSB-30 launched from the Alcantara launch site in Maranhao on Saturday, Oct. 23. This is a significant improvement from the fiery August 2003 launchpad explosion of a similar rocket.

A space base in Brazil has an advantage by being on the equator-since the Earth is spinning fastest at the equator, it takes less energy to fling a rocket into space.

The private company SpaceX is still developing its Falcon 1 rocket, which has been delivered to Vandendurg Air Force Base in California for launchpad testing.

Elon Musk, the chairman and CEO of SpaceX, has funded the rocket's development largely through the sale of his previous company, Paypal.

The European Space Agency's SMART-1 spacecraft entered lunar orbit on Nov. 15, after traveling more than 84 million kilometers to get there.

As if flying to the moon wasn't impressive enough, the craft did it with a new type of engine-a solar-electric propulsion system, or ion engine, which generates thrust by expelling ions accelerated by an electric field. The electricity is created by the craft's solar panels.

Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science successfully launched and deployed the world's first solar sail on Aug. 9. A test only, it was deployed from a rocket launched from the Uchinoura Space Center, then jettisoned shortly after deployment, according to an ISAS release.

The first actual solar sail powered spacecraft is planned to be deployed into orbit on March 5, 2005, from an SS-N-18 submarine launched ballistic missile. The project is the work of the Planetary Society, an independent international group.

Solar sail craft use the pressure exerted by the sun's photons to propel them.

Bigelow Aerospace has received U.S. government approval to launch a one-third scale version of its inflatable space module.

Bigelow's goal, according their their startlingly underwhelming Web site www.bigelowaerospace.com, is to provide low-cost habitable housing in low Earth orbit.

Low-cost because it's inflatable.

NASA's midair retrieval of the returning Genesis probe did not go well. The helicopters which were meant to snag the craft out of the sky as it descended never even had a chance, as the craft's parachutes never deployed and Genesis plunged straight into the Utah ground on Sept. 8.

Remarkably, scientists have been able to salvage some data from the crashed craft. Genesis was carrying a delicate payload of solar wind particles captured in space.

A Chinese satellite crashed into a home in Sichuan province on October 15. The scientific research satellite was in the process of making its planned return to Earth after completing 18 days in orbit.

"A giant parachute with a conical-shaped black 'top' was seen falling from the sky and landed through the roof of a villager's house in the Tianbeizi vegetable market area," a local paper said.

"The landing technology of our country's satellites is very mature and the precision of the landing point is among the best in the world. Members of the public need not worry about this," Chinese space experts said.

Not even the tenant of the wrecked apartment seemed worried, saying "The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year."

Found: In October a German television crew rediscovered a Soviet Buran space shuttle in the Bahrain desert. It is apparently one of several pre-production models of the Soviet shuttle design, one of which achieved orbit in 1988. The whereabouts of several of the shuttles are unknown, and the ownership of this particular shuttle is currently in dispute in the Bahrain court system.

Surfacing online this year were photos of the Soviet Union's space battle station prototype, "Polyus," which was launched in 1987 but then fell from orbit. It was designed to carry both a laser cannon and space mines.

telescopes and other perversities

For the beloved Hubble Space Telescope, 2004 has brought horror and wonder.

President George Bush proposed a bold new series of goals for the U.S. space program in early 2004, including a human return to the moon by 2020 and eventual human missions to Mars.

That plan called for freeing up part of the NASA budget by retiring the space shuttles, and a crucial service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope was abandoned because of this. Thus, the telescope was to deteriorate and eventually become useless.

That didn't stop the Hubble.

Scientists have now seen farther back in time than ever before, through an image taken by the Hubble.

Called the Ultra Deep Field, the image was created from a series of exposures taken between September 2003 and January 2004, and in addition to the 10,000 galaxies visible in the image the picture also reveals fainter, more distant galaxies than have previously been visible, according to NASA.

The most distant object in the universe, as seen by Hubble, may be two red streaks. The galaxy cluster Abell 2218 has acted as a gravitational lens, allowing the object, which is behind Abell 2218, to be seen. The object appears as two red streaks, although it is believed to be a small system of stars from the very early days of the universe, perhaps when the universe was as young as 750 million years old. The object is some 13 billion light-years away.

Also in 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed 100 new exoplanets, which doubled the number of known planets in our galaxy.

By midyear, however, one of the Hubble's four main instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, failed.

NASA engineers tried to come up with scenarios to fix the problem and extend the telescope's life, and in August NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced his intention to "go save Hubble."

Unfortunately, the proposed robotic repair mission was deemed too costly, and O'Keefe has since resigned.

Scientists have devised a way to use interstellar gas clouds as massive natural telescopes. This new technique for viewing distant objects is called "Earth-Orbit Synthesis" and promises to reveal detail 100 times finer than any other known method. Utilizing a phenomenon called interstellar scintillation, scientists would use the density variations of existing interstellar gas clouds to bend light as a lens would.

Chicken Little speaks

On March 18, asteroid 2004 FH passed within 27,000 miles of Earth-only a few thousand miles further out than the orbit used by geostationary weather satellites. The 100-foot-wide asteroid had only been spotted by astronomers three days before. The asteroid was close enough to be visible with binoculars to viewers in the southern hemisphere.

On Wednesday, Sept. 29, the asteroid Toutatis (2.9 miles long) flew within one million miles of Earth, making it the largest observed asteroid ever to pass so close.

Saturn, Cassini and Huygens

The Cassini craft has sent back stunning pictures of Saturn and its moons in 2004, and on Dec. 24 the Huygens probe separated from the craft in preparation for its Jan. 14, 2005 rendezvous with Saturn's legendary moon Titan.

But that's a story for next year.