Schiaparelli, SpaceX, Soyuz … 2016 was the year of losses in space. But there were real sensations in the past year.
It's not like building rockets for you. Usually people use this stable expression to emphasize the ease of a particular job. To paraphrase it, everything related to missiles is difficult - and dangerous. If someone suddenly forgot about it, in 2016 he had a lot of opportunities to remember it.
In early December, the Russian Progress launch vehicle crashed with two and a half tons of cargo for the International Space Station (ISS) crew. Reason: a still unclear problem arose with the third stage of the Soyuz launch vehicle. The crash added to the already long list of accidents in Russian space technology and was a clear indication of how bad things are in the space industry of the country, which was once a world leader in this industry - and at the same time how difficult this one seemed to be. would, routine work in space.
The European Space Agency ESA also faced a disaster in 2016. In October, the Schiaparelli lander was supposed to land on the surface of the Red Planet as part of the ExoMars mission with Russia. But due to a communication error between the navigation system and the altimeter, the device collapsed at a speed of 300 km / h on the sand of the Meridian plateau.
As a result, another small crater appeared on the surface of Mars, a pile of twisted metal - and there was hope that next time everything would be more successful: the Europeans and Russians are already planning another landing on the "red planet" in 2020. In early December, ESA member countries approved the plan.
For the private space transportation company SpaceX and its head Elon Musk, the outgoing year has not been the best either. Although Musk is fond of all sorts of dreams like the colonization of Mars (in September he presented the corresponding plan), first he has to deal with earthly problems. So, in September, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded in preparation for launch from the spaceport at Cape Canaveral.
Bottom line: one destroyed rocket, one burned-out satellite worth $ 195 million, one broken launch pad. SpaceX's next launch is scheduled only next year. The company now needs to demonstrate that it is truly credible as a space carrier. Although it already has orders worth $ 10 billion, its stated goal is to truly revolutionize the space industry by offering services at extremely low prices for satellite launches - but this goal is only achievable if the satellites have a good chance of getting into a given orbit. …
The planned crash took place this year: at the end of September, the European probe Rosetta met the surface of comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was at that moment somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. Thus, at a distance of about 720 million kilometers from the Earth, the space mission of recent years has successfully completed - 12 years after launch and two years after reaching the goal lost in the Universe.
Promotional video:
According to the ESA, the Rosetta landed on the comet's surface at a walking speed of about one meter per second. After that, all transmitters were automatically switched off. Thus, nothing is reliably known about the future fate of the probe on Earth. Only one thing is clear: "We will be decrypting the received data for several decades," - said the participant of this project Matt Taylor (Matt Taylor).
The outgoing year brought important news to astronaut Alexander Gerst. In May, it became known that from May to November 2018, the geophysicist will go on his second space flight. There he even has to become the commander of the ISS crew. In practical terms, this means that ESA members have agreed to participate in the ISS project until 2024. ISS Crew Commander - even if this is only a formal title, it sounds proudly. By the way, until now, none of the ISS commanders was German.
Gerst is Germany's eleventh representative in space. At the same time, not a single German woman has ever gone there. That should change with Claudia Kessler's flight - if all goes well before the end of this decade. There is no shortage of potential astronauts who are ready to temporarily postpone their careers in other areas for the sake of lengthy preparation for flight beyond the Earth's atmosphere. The question is whether Kessler will be able to find sponsors willing to pay for her space flight.
The first Chinese woman named Liu Yang, by the way, went into space back in 2012. A year later, her other compatriot followed her - and soon their ranks may be replenished. Because China's true ambitions this year have become more evident than ever. In September, the Celestial Empire delivered the main element of its new space station Tiangong 2 to near-earth orbit, which was already inhabited in October as part of the first manned mission. This entire space "outpost" of China should be commissioned in 2022. A year earlier, it is planned to land a robot on Mars, and in 2024 - to land a manned vehicle on the Moon.
In addition, in the outgoing year, the Celestial Empire put into operation the world's largest radio telescope Fast, as well as a new cosmodrome in Hainan.
The news of the year, of course, was the gravitational waves, which were announced in February by an international team of scientists. To be more precise, they achieved this success back on September 14, 2015 using the measuring instruments of the Advanced Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory (aLIGO), located in the United States. However, the following months they spent on double-checking the information, whether they really happened to observe the collision of two "black holes". As a result, they stated that they saw him - and this became the sensation of the century.
Gravitational waves, the existence of which Albert Einstein spoke of, are actually not that rare. They arise every time when, somewhere in the universe, there is an acceleration of masses. But usually they are so weak that, until recently, no convincing evidence of their existence has been obtained. Until recently. However, already in June, researchers reported a second such confirmation. Now - after a short break - the sensor is working again, and scientists hope for new positive results. The Nobel Prize for gravitational waves was not awarded this year, but it is possible that it will happen in 2017.
Our publication wrote about another sensational cosmic discovery in mid-August - long before the official announcement of the scientists involved in the research: at a distance of 4.2 light years from Earth, they managed to find the nearest planet to us outside the solar system - but only by indirect signs, thanks to changes in the color spectrum of the star Proxima Centauri.
It is even possible that there are conditions on this planet under which life is possible on it. However, there are many more questions connected with this assumption. However, astrophysicists at the French research institute CNRS are already arguing about whether this exoplanet has oceans similar to Earth's.
And another planet was studied by researchers in the past year - even if it is completely hidden from their views. And if it exists at all. We are talking about a celestial body, the mass of which is ten times the mass of the Earth and which, possibly, rotates somewhere on the very outskirts of the solar system.
In any case, Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena suggest the existence of this planet. They presented the corresponding theory in January this year. Their "planet number nine" orbits the Sun in a time interval between 10 and 20 thousand years. Scientists assume its existence based on data on the orbits of other celestial bodies of the so-called "Kuiper belt", located beyond the orbit of Neptune. If, I repeat, this planet exists at all.
