This year, we kicked things off by telling you how deadly and difficult space is to explore. It can kill you with radiation, giant flying space rocks, and regular old time. And those are just a few of its weapons.
But while space is a pretty dangerous place, it's also incredibly inspirational. If you take science fiction as your model---which we often do---people are at their best when faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge. So 2016 abounded with launches, newly discovered dwarf planets, steps toward Mars, and victorious ends to long-haul missions. And it's our pleasure show you the highlight reel.
What didn't scientists find in space this year? Well, besides aliens: Even though people were pretty excited about a potentially intelligent signal coming from the Sun-like star HD164595, astronomers say it was likely nothing. But while aliens are still proving elusive, NASA scientists located plenty of new exoplanets where they might be hiding.
NASA's Kepler space telescope survived some major malfunctions and discovered a whopping 1, 284 new exoplanets this year, some of which are in the Goldilocks zone, where the conditions could be just right for life. Most notably, they caught sight of a little world called Proxima Centauri b, which is not only Earth-like, but also kinda nearby: about 25 trillion miles away. (We know. It isn't *that *close. But this is an exoplanet, not a post office.) In the even nearer Kuiper belt, space geeks found so many dwarf planets and dwarf planet moons that people got bored with their successes.
Closer, inside our own inner solar system, scientists expanded their definition of the Goldilocks zone. Usually liquid water is only possible at a certain (short) distance from a planet's star. But following a flood of data from the New Horizons spacecraft, scientists think Pluto's fractured icy surface might be evidence of a water ocean freezing outward, the water kept liquid towards the dwarf planet's core by enormous pressure. And inside the traditional Goldilocks zone, on Jupiter's famously watery moon, Europa, scientists found more evidence of huge water plumes bursting up through the moon's icy crust. Which would make sampling the ocean for signs of life, or pre-biotic materials like tholins, a whole lot easier.
2016 was also a year of long-awaited payoffs. After a few false starts, the International Space Station got a prototype inflatable extension, a test of tech that will one day let give ISS astronauts a little more leg room. And after a five year journey, NASA's Juno mission arrived at Jupiter this 4th of July. After a nail-biter of an engine burn, it inserted into orbit to study everything from the stormy gas giant's powerful auroras to the secrets of its core. Juno is set to loop around Jupiter 37 times, and its first orbit has already returned stunning images of its never-before-seen poles.
The European Space Agency's major event had a more somber tone. After a 12-year journey to the distant comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, ESA's Rosetta spacecraft went into a scheduled destructive orbit and bashed itself into the comet's surface. The mission's end came after two years of data collection, and just a few weeks after Rosetta's cameras spotted the downed Philae lander, thought lost after a disastrously bumpy touchdown. ESA got weepy about it. (Less than a month later, they got weepier: ESA's ExoMars lander, Schiaparelli, crashed into the surface of the Red Planet and was destroyed on impact.)
The Rosetta mission's success bodes well for future missions to small bodies in space, like asteroid mining ventures. This fall NASA launched OSIRIS-REx, its asteroid-sampling spacecraft, and the mission should reach the asteroid Bennu in 2019. When spacecrafts can reliably orbit and land on small bodies, scientists can turn asteroids and comets into mobile refueling stations and radiation shield factories, simplifying long-haul manned missions. Which makes the trek to Mars---something scientists are already testing robots, rockets, building materials, and people for---look a lot more possible.
Still, human space exploration isn't moving only from strength to strength. While the Chinese space program ascends, scoring its first month-long manned mission and nearing completion on its version of GPS, BeiDou, Russia's declines. Even Roscosmos' long-reliable Soyuz rockets are failing, probably because of system-wide corruption, and devastating budget cuts. Post-Brexit, British space scientists are worrying about their spacefaring funds, too.
NASA should (and probably does) share those concerns. 2016 was a phenomenal year for space science, but mostly because of missions that were funded, developed, and launched five, ten, or more years ago---when NASA's budget was closer to 1 percent of the nation's total. In the last few years, it's occasionally fallen below just half of a percent. While it's too early to tell how space will fare under the new administration, it's safe to say that unless NASA gets a larger slice of the budget, space fans may not see a year like 2016 for a good long while.
