It has been a remarkable year—no matter what the arena: politics, medicine, rocket science, exploration of the universe, and the list goes on.
We began this inaugural year of the CE 2021 Blog with remarkable engineering feats (Obliterate The Box: Three Spectacular Feats Of Rocket Science) including the landing of Perseverance on Mars. Several weeks later, we had the thrill of watching Ingenuity take off (Ingenuity Takes Flight and Fires the Imagination), establishing the first flight of an aircraft on another planet. Ingenuity has flown seventeen more times (as of today, December 30, 2021) and established new capabilities—terrain mapping, scouting for the rover, going where Perseverance could not. If you’d like to keep up with Ingenuity, check out the blog site or the flight log.
Perseverance has established firsts of its own: collecting core samples and exploring and analyzing the floor of the Jezero crater, most notably the Séítah region, characterized by sanding ripples. (For some fun, check out the Flash Series: Mars vs. The Invaders in which the Séítah region figures prominently.) Along the way, Perseverance photographed a sunset for the first time. Follow Perseverance at the mission blog site and stay up to date. Catch the weather report at https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/weather/.
[Ref: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26365/mastcam-zs-first-martian-sunset/ ]
And let’s not forget about Curiosity, which has been diligently pursuing its mission since it landed on August 6, 2012 (EDT). Load this link to your smartphone and you can get regular weather reports [https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/weather/]. Check out other links on the site to learn what Curiosity has been up to.
In the year we covered a Chinese Mars mission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-1), electric race cars, hyper-loops, rockets, and lunar and Martian habitats. Based on responses from readers, the most popular post was the Dancing Robots (Tripping the Light Fantastic: Take a Robot as Your Partner).
This brings us to the year-end’s remarkable achievement—launching the James Webb Space Telescope on December 25, 2021. The telescope will look back to the earliest times of the birth of the universe. The launch was exciting to watch, but the progress of the mission until the telescope is on station will be a nail-biter. I’m tense, and I’m just watching. I can’t imagine how the mission team sleeps at night. But my guess is they are tense but have confidence in the engineering (and testing) that went into this remarkable accomplishment. If you’d like to stay up to date on the mission, save https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html to your smartphone home screen and check in every so often. My current obsession is checking in every five minutes, it seems. But then again, at its current velocity, it’s traveled over 150 miles in those five minutes—who knows what can happen.
[Graphics Credit: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2016/09/Artist_representation_of_the_JWST ]
Leave a comment and let me know what you think. What was your favorite post of the year? Will you be following the progress of the Mars mission and be watching anxiously for the new telescope to get into position and begin sending back pictures and data?
I know I’m looking forward to an exciting 2022.
Thanks for stopping by. Happy Holidays.
[Disclaimer: Please accept my apologies for any ads that pop up before the linked videos. They do not reflect my position, nor do I endorse any of the products—it’s just a YouTube thing I can’t get around.]
This is the right site for anybody who would like to find out about this topic. You realize so much its almost hard to argue with you (not that I personally would want to…HaHa). You certainly put a new spin on a subject that has been discussed for many years. Wonderful stuff, just wonderful!
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