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2015 Was the Most Dramatic Year for Space Nerds in Recent Memory

From alien megastructures to Plutonian encounters, 2015 delivered payload after payload of insane space stories.
Launch of SpaceX CRS-6. Image: SpaceX

From Plutonian flybys to launchpad explosions, the year 2015 has been a total roller-coaster for space nerds. The last 12 months have been liberally sprinkled with discoveries and disasters, spacesuits and lawsuits, and heaps of premium space porn. Here are our picks for the biggest space stories of the year—the good, the bad, and the pyrotechnic. 2016 sure has a lot to live up to.

10. Mercury lost a friend, and Venus gained one.

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There has been so much talk about outer Solar System discoveries over the past year that it can be easy to overlook the exploration of the inner Solar System. To that point, on April 30, Mercury lost its first and only orbiter, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, when it crashed into the planet after completing its productive 11-year mission. Rest in pieces, humble friend.

On the flipside, Venus welcomed its new orbiter, the Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft, on December 7. This feat was a long time coming, as Akatsuki originally arrived at Venus in December 2010, but failed to enter the planet's orbit. After that, the spacecraft wandered off to orbit the Sun for a few years, until the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) aced its second chance to gravitationally tether itself to Venus earlier this month.

Extra points for this awesome cartoon ode to the event.

9. Philae, Rosetta's comet lander, woke up.

Speaking of sweet spacecraft redemption, on June 14, the Philae lander woke up from its seven-month-long beauty sleep aboard Comet 67/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P).

You may remember that Philae's touchdown on the comet was one of the biggest science triumphs of 2014, further cementing the European Space Agency (ESA) as an ambitious leader in world spaceflight. However, the achievement was somewhat dampened by the fact that Philae had a very bumpy descent, and ended up settling down in a shadowy area far from its target site. With limited access to sunlight, it shut down only 60 hours after landing.

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But as the comet lurched towards its closest approach to the Sun this past summer, the little lander finally juiced up and began transmitting new results about its alien environment. This one also gets extra points for its adorable cartoon spinoffs.

8. The Thirty Meter Telescope blues.

The past year has been emotional for everyone involved in the controversy surrounding the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a massive observatory that was given the greenlight to build on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea in 2011.

Many Hawaiian activists believe that the TMT is a desecration of their religious and cultural heritage, which has resulted in several high profile protests, negotiations, and court cases over the use of Mauna Kea for astronomical research. On December 2, the Hawaii Supreme Court revoked the TMT's permit, putting the future of the observatory, which would be the largest in the northern hemisphere, into doubt.

Fortunately, the other two 30-meter-class telescopes currently in construction—the European Extremely Large Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope—are both on track to open in the 2020s, in Chile.

7. Alien megastructures.

A star named KIC 8462852 caused a media storm in September, after astronomers observed its bizarre light curve fluctuations. The reason for these dimming periods? Aliens, obviously. One million times, aliens! And in this case, aliens with advanced megastructures that can mine solar energy straight from the source.

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It is an awesome hypothesis, but follow-up studies continue to render it very improbable, with the smart money on a natural cause—like a swarm of comets—rather than star-powered megastructures. Still, KIC 8462852's odd behavior has made it a prime target for study in 2016 and beyond.

6. Exoplanets galore.

While KIC 8462852 may not host life, a number of promising discoveries in the search for habitable worlds beyond our Solar System were racked up this year. Indeed, before 2015 was even a week old, two new exoplanets had been discovered with very interesting characteristics, including similar sizes and estimated surface temperatures to Earth.

Then, on July 23, NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-452b, deemed to be the most "Earthlike" exoplanet ever found. This world, located 1,400 light years away, orbits a Sunlike star and has a similar orbital distance and period to Earth, though it is significantly larger and older than our own planet.

Concept drawing of Kepler-452b. Image: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

As I pointed out in a recent article, the term "Earthlike" should always be taken with a healthy pinch of salt, because it's a term with shifting parameters and accuracy. But that doesn't undercut the amazing yields that exoplanet researchers have made over the last year, which have brought us that much closer to discovering truly habitable worlds beyond Earth.

5. The One Year Crew

On March 27, American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko left Earth to embark on roughly a year-long stint aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The pair, known as the One Year Crew, have yielded numerous insights into the long-term effects of spaceflight on the human body and mind. Let the dulcet tones of Billy Dee Williams tell you all about it in this video summary of the mission.

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Summary of the One Year Crew. Video: NASA Johnson/YouTube

As an added bonus, Kelly is the identical twin brother of fellow astronaut Mark Kelly, providing NASA with a fantastic opportunity to compare the physiological and mental states of Earthbound and space-faring twins. All of this information will be vital to NASA if it wants to meet its deadline of sending humans on long duration spaceflight missions—including trips to Mars—during the 2030s. More on that in the next entry.

4. Water on Mars.

Mars has long been the object of human fantasies about interplanetary civilization, and this year, those dreams got a whole lot more real when NASA announced that it had found the strongest evidence ever for flowing water on its surface.

Images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) revealed that Mars's Palikir Crater is likely home to "recurring slope lineae," which is a fancy term for briny liquid water that melts and flows during the planet's summer.

Not only does this discovery have important implications for our understanding of Martian geology, it will also be a major consideration in the hunt for the perfect site to build the first human settlement on Mars which, incidentally, also kicked off this year. The first Mars-bound astronauts will need to quench their thirst when they reach the Red Planet, and now we know of at least one location where they can do so.

3. Sticking the landing.

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2015 was a tumultuous year for SpaceX, and the pursuit of reusable rockets as a whole. After two fiery failed attempts to land its first stage engine onto an ocean barge, SpaceX hit a new low on June 28, when its Falcon 9 rocket, loaded up with millions of dollars worth of food and supplies for the International Space Station crew, exploded dramatically two minutes after launch.

The company was forced to take a hiatus of almost half a year, during which time its main rival, the spaceflight company Blue Origin, snatched away the milestone of the first soft landing of a first stage engine on land, from a suborbital flight, with its New Shepard engine. Given that the two companies were recently locked in bitter legal battles over ownership over these landing maneuvers, it's not surprising that SpaceX's head Elon Musk and Blue Origin head Jeff Bezos have been throwing some pretty epic shade at each other in the wake of all these events.

The rarest of beasts - a used rocket. Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy. Check out video: Jeff BezosNovember 24, 2015

Elon MuskNovember 24, 2015

However, SpaceX won back some of its prestige on December 21, when it pulled off a much more ambitious overland touchdown of the Falcon 9 first stage than Blue Origin's version. Where the New Shepard's first stage only peaked its head into space at an altitude of 62 miles before descending back to Earth, the Falcon 9 first stage flew to 124 miles before returning, not to mention it reaches speeds twice as high as Blue Origin's engine.

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2. S'up, Ceres.

After eight years of adventures in outer space, NASA's Dawn spacecraft made history on March 6 when it entered the orbit of its final destination: Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt.

Not only did this mark the first time that a spacecraft has ever entered orbit around a dwarf planet, it also resulted in some remarkable close-up views of Ceres's otherworldly surface features, including these eye-catching bright patches that were later revealed to be massive salt flats.

Ceres in false color. Image: NASA/Dawn

In any other year, this achievement would have snagged the top spot on any list of space discoveries. But 2015 was filled with tough competition, and only a few months after Dawn entered Ceres orbit, it was upstaged by an even more momentous encounter with a dwarf planet…

1. Pluto steals the show.

New Horizons snapshot of Pluto. Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

Pluto is no longer considered to be one of the planets, but it is still popularly regarded as a mysterious frontier; the last major world in our Solar System left unexplored. That all changed on July 14, when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by this distant dwarf planet, and finally bringing it into focus after decades of conjecture.

In the months since, we have been overloaded with exciting facts about Pluto. It's geologically active. It hosts water ice. Many of its moons are not tidally locked to it, and are unaccountably shiny. It has a freakin' adorable heart-shaped region on it. The discoveries just keep stacking up, even as New Horizons barrels deeper into the Kuiper Belt, where no probe has gone before.

To that point, the very name "New Horizons" could be a catch-all for the entire year in space news. In 2015, the human reach into space was dramatically extended, with unparalleled vision and ingenuity. Whether it was the pursuit of reusable rockets, the effort to send humans to Mars, or the search for habitable worlds in the wider Milky Way, this year really brought the heat.