The time has come to recapitulate the most important developments in space exploration and astronomy in 2021. And there was no lack of opportunity. Check out the Top 5 of the Sidereal Messenger.
5) SPACE TOURISM FOR REAL
This was the year that walking around the space became a commercial reality. The two main competitors for the suborbital market, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, performed manned flights, taking their billionaire owners (Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos) to the edge of space for a couple of minutes. Also worth mentioning is SpaceX, by Elon Musk, which performed the first totally private orbital flight, in the Inspiration4 project, and good old Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, which once again brought tourists into orbit. Now the gate is open, and soon these tours will stop being news and become business.
4) STARSHIP TO THE MOON
NASA (American space agency) took the courageous decision in 2021 to hire SpaceX to perform the first manned landing on the Moon of the 21st century, in the Artemis program. The vehicle will be the Starship, under development by the company with the ambition of enabling the colonization of Mars in the future. Now you need to see if it will work. NASA has already admitted that it will not be possible to carry out the mission until 2025.
3) SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE
The Dark Energy Survey project presented results from its first three years of observation. The large international collaboration led by Fermilab, in the USA, has Brazilian participation and focuses on a telescopic sky sweep with a powerful 570 megapixel camera. The effort is to understand what dark matter and dark energy are, two great mysteries of astrophysics. For now, what has been seen is consistent with the so-called standard model of cosmology.
2) A GREAT MARCIAN SEASON
This year, three countries arrived on the red planet, two of them in an unprecedented way. The UAE successfully placed its first spacecraft in Martian orbit, the Al-Amal (Hope, or Hope), and China shaved a beard, hair and mustache: its Tianwen-1 mission featured an orbiter, landing module and rover. The Zhurong jeep came to the surface in May, making China the first country after the US to successfully conduct a Martian ground mission. And the Americans also made history, with the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter, the first artifact to fly on another planet.
1) WORLD’S LARGEST SPACE TELESCOPE
Seven years late, we saw the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA’s partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), the satellite cost more than US$10 billion and will go through a tense opening process (with no less than 347 points of failure) before it can operate. A mission that can easily go from the most resounding success to the most resounding failure, should something go wrong. Among the promises and the risks, it was the most important space event of 2021.
This column is published on Mondays in Folha Corrida.
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