There were stunning cosmic images to feast on in 2020, from Hubble’s 30th anniversary to images of a daring steel grip on an asteroid. Here is our selection of the offer of the year.
Hubble’s ‘cosmic reef’
The Hubble telescope, one of the most important scientific instruments ever built, celebrated its 30th anniversary in April.
To mark the occasion, an astonishing image of a star-forming region near our Milky Way Galaxy was released.
In this beautiful Hubble portrait, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way 163,000 light-years away.
Nebulae are huge interstellar dust and gas clouds where star formation can take place.
At the heart of NGC 2014 is a group of bright stars, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our sun.
The image was nicknamed “cosmic reef” because astronomers thought the nebulae looked like an undersea world.
A BBC Horizon documentary, broadcast to mark the anniversary, showed stunning 3D visualisations of iconic Hubble images – such as the Pillars of Creation, part of the Eagle Nebula.
Also see: The universe from the Hubble telescope revealed in 3D
Grab asteroid
This year, Nasa’s Osiris-Rex performed a daring “touch-and-go” maneuver with the asteroid Bennu to collect rock and earth samples for delivery to Earth.
Asteroids like Bennu are primitive remnants of the early solar system. They are the free-moving building blocks of planets and offer a glimpse into how worlds such as Earth came into being.
To collect samples, Osiris-Rex used a long boom with an annular collection chamber at the end. The spacecraft descended to the surface of Bennu and delivered a jet of nitrogen when the boom made contact with the asteroid.
This was so that the gas would shake up Bennu’s surface, allowing fragments of the asteroid to float into the collection chamber.
The strategy seems to have worked, as shown in the series of images above.
Meanwhile, on December 5, a Japanese mission to collect samples from another asteroid returned to Earth with its precious cache. The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft released its monster reentry capsule, which parachuted safely into the Australian desert.
The samples will be analyzed at a curation facility in Sagamihara City, Japan.
Close-up with the sun
In January, photos were released from the Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii, showing the surface of the sun in unprecedented detail.
The images show cell-like structures roughly the size of the US state of Texas. They are masses of hot, excited gas or plasma.
The bright areas indicate where this material rises; the dark bands in between are where cooler plasma sinks.
DKIST is a brand new facility on Haleakalā, a 3,000-foot volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
Scientists want to use it to gain new insights into the dynamic behavior of our parent star, in the hope that they can better predict its energetic bursts.
These colossal bursts of charged particles can damage orbiting satellites, harm astronauts, and even shut down power grids.
Jupiter flies by
NASA’s Juno spacecraft, launched in 2011, continues to send back stunning images of the solar system’s largest planet – Jupiter.
The probe captured images of the gas giant’s swirling cloud decks as it made its 27th near flyby of the world on June 2.
Citizen scientist Kevin M Gill then transformed the data into a video, which combines 41 still images taken during Juno’s close pass.
The stills were digitally projected onto a sphere, with a virtual “camera” that could view Jupiter from different angles.
Among other things, the images provide amazing images of Jupiter’s most striking feature, the giant red spot – which is actually a giant continuous storm.
Starship test
Elon Musk’s Starship vehicle looks a bit like a rocket from the golden age of science fiction and will – he hopes – transport people to the Red Planet in due course.
In December, SpaceX tested the vehicle’s first complete prototype and sent it on a 12-mile flight straight from its path to the company’s Boca Chica facility in South Texas.
We’re cheating a bit with the shot here, as the images don’t come out of space as such. But we may see it there someday, in the not-too-distant future.
The test flight showed some of the spacecraft’s unique features, including the methane-burning Raptor engines and a flight trajectory with a belly-focused descent to Earth followed by a return to vertical just before landing.
It was at this stage of testing that the Starship’s prototype, dubbed SN8, approached the pad a little too fast and too hard, causing what Musk describes as a RUD – rapid unplanned teardown. In other words, a crash.
But the flight will have provided SpaceX with massive amounts of tech data to chew, allowing them to improve the vehicle. And the next prototype – SN9 – awaits its turn on the launch pad.
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