The year has been an explosion in space exploration, from NASA’s big step in returning to missions to the Moon, to visions of the origins of the universe and the hope that humanity can survive the ‘doomsday scenario of an asteroid hurtling towards Earth.
Here are the events that shaped 2022 in space advancements:
back to the moon
NASA hadn’t sent a crew-capable spacecraft to the moon in half a century when Artemis 1 lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral in November. Aboard the mighty Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever, the unoccupied next-generation Orion capsule flew 1.3 million miles in a 25-day flight to test hardware and support systems for sending humans back to the lunar surface and beyond.
The Artemis I unmanned lunar rocket lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Orion splashed into the Pacific Ocean on December 11, 50 years after two Apollo 17 astronauts became the last of the 12 moonwalkers in history. Mission managers are still evaluating data from the Artemis mission, but the program is on track for a manned lunar flyby in 2024 and a scheduled lunar landing the following year.
A vision of creation
In July, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope sent back the highest-resolution images ever seen of distant galaxies as they looked billions of years ago, promising astronomers a glimpse of the dawn of creation
An image of Jupiter taken by the James Webb Space Telescope shows the planet’s weather patterns, tiny moons, altitude levels, cloud cover and auroras at the north and south poles. Photograph: NASA/AFP/Getty Images
The stunning clear color images of the invisible universe were hailed by NASA chief Bill Nelson as a new era in astronomy, showing Webb’s ability to look back 13.5 billion years, close to the big bang . “We’re almost back to square one,” he said.
In November, Webb found two more galaxies, one of which may have formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang.
A moving occasion
In a “watershed moment for planetary defense” in September, NASA crashed a multibillion-dollar spacecraft the size of a car into an asteroid the size of a football stadium and demonstrated for the first time that could alter the orbit of a celestial body.
The Dart mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) was an unprecedented test of the space agency’s ability to defend Earth from a doomsday scenario of a massive asteroid colliding .
The impact shortened Dimorphos’ orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos by about 32 minutes, to 11 hours and 23 minutes.
Private investigators
The first all-private astronaut crew returned from the International Space Station (ISS) in April, the three wealthy paying guests joining a former space shuttle commander aboard Axiom 1 flight on a SpaceX rocket Falcon 9 launched at Cape Canaveral.
Ax-1 crew in a pre-mission training session. Photograph: Axiom Space/AFP/Getty Images
The civilian astronauts, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy, were paid about $55 million for the 17-day mission, during which they joined American and Russian crews aboard the ISS and took carry out more than 25 research projects, incorporating regenerative medicine and space technology. .
Former NASA chief astronaut Peggy Whitson is slated to command Axiom 2 in May 2023.
Breath of fresh air
The potential for humans to one day live on the Red Planet moved a step closer in August when researchers announced that a lunchbox-sized instrument called Moxie (Oxygen Resource Utilization Experiment in situ on Mars) had been generating breathable oxygen.
Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory lower the Moxie instrument into the belly of the Perseverance rover. Photograph: Nasa/JPL-Caltech/Reuters
Moxie, part of NASA’s Perseverance astrobiology project on Mars, successfully produced oxygen during seven experimental tests, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, day and night, across different Martian stations . Each race produced at least 6 g of oxygen per hour, similar to the rate of a modest tree on Earth.
Expanded versions of Moxie could be part of NASA’s Artemis program that aims to land humans on Mars in the 2030s.
Chinese space debris
China’s space program sparked global outrage in November when a piece of a rocket used to deliver a module to its new Tiangong space station fell to Earth out of control, prompting the closure of European airspace and hundreds of flight delays.
It was the second time in 2022 that parts of China’s Long March rockets had threatened populated areas, prompting space experts to call on the “irresponsible” country to clean up its act. Chinese space debris has previously landed in the Maldives and India.
China completed construction of Tiangong for a crew of three in 2022 and is already considering expansion.
Russia does it alone
Russian space agency Roscosmos announced in July that it was ending its two-decade partnership with the United States on the International Space Station and planned to focus on building its own outpost in orbit.
Analysts linked the move to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as tensions between the US and Russia rose over the conflict. The announcement came just three months after a crew of Russian cosmonauts boarded the ISS in the yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag.
Russian President Vladimir Putin responded “fine” when he was told by Yuri Borisov, the new head of Roscosmos, that Russia was out after fulfilling its ISS obligations until 2024.
Business travelers
Boeing joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX in May as the only commercial companies to dock their space vehicles to the International Space Station, a major step forward in their plans to carry humans aboard their crew capsule Starliner.
SpaceX continues to dominate the commercial space market with two manned missions to the ISS in 2022, among the 61 total launches it plans this year.
Longtime NASA partner Boeing has followed SpaceX in developing a crew capsule. Its first manned Starliner test flight has been delayed until April 2023.