I Let My Viewers Decide THE BEST SPACE NEWS of 2024. Here's What Happened

2024 was an amazing year for space and astronomy news and we released a new episode of space bites every week and as you probably know every week we put a vote on the channel where we ask you the viewers to tell us what you thought was the best story of the week and then we celebrate it next week we ride a new poll and we keep going and you thought that all of that data was just going to be forgotten but no we were watching we were recording and now here we are at the end of the year and I am going to take your choices and reveal them back to you and show you in context what you thought were the best stories of 2024 now it's really important to understand here that you know there were many of stories that you're just not going to hear about and that's because you voted for some other story to be higher and so there's going to be a lot of completely notable things here that are just completely missing and that's totally fine you know uh it was super fun to put up the vote and it's going to be a lot of fun to kind of go through these and hopefully you will all enjoy as we go through and look back at what an incredible year 20124 was January an ancient stone map the true color of Neptune slim landing and the end of Ingenuity this is a nice mix so we've got a lot of interesting stories in January I would say the big story of this collection is the final Flight of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars and this happened back in January and we didn't know the full extent of what was going to finally happen until later on in the year and really we only got the final report just a couple of weeks ago from when I'm recording this but you clearly had a fondness for Ingenuity over all of its 72 flights and yet on that 72 flight it suffered a massive problem broke its rotors and would never fly again but also we learned this horrible lie that Neptune is actually more like the color of Uranus all along and we thought that one was kind of this grayish blue and the other one was this deep blue but in fact they're both a kind of grayish blue and of course we've got the slim Lander which landed successfully on the moon just flipped over on its side and yet it keeps coming back over many more months as being an incredible success story for being able to work despite the problems that it suffered on its landing and of course this really cool map of the sky that had been in a tomb for thousands of years that showed the accurate positions of many stars including one extra spot where there might have been a supernova February slim woke up an impossible Galaxy an ocean on mimus and the odys is landing and so to continue from January Japan's slim Lander landed on its side and all hope was lost but it was able to send some final Communications right at the end of the month when sunlight finally reached its solar panels but then obviously it was going to die during the long long harsh lunar night right well no it actually came back at the end of the lunar night and was able to continue on communicating and did it another time and this Lander which failed to stick the landing still was able to send some data home able to last through the lunar night and demonstrated some great engineering and some good ideas for future missions to the moon and speaking of future missions to the moon this was when we also got the Odus Lander landing on the moon and it also landed and then fell over on its side was able to communicate a little bit of data home and then failed and it did not survive the lunar knite we learned that Saturn's moon memis you know the Death Star Moon it might also have a subsurface ocean like Enceladus and Europa and many other icy moons here in the solar system and James Webb accidentally found a Galaxy that's almost entirely made of dark matter we had a lot of James web stories this year and of course we'll be including all of them in our annual James web year wrap up so wait for that next summer March How the Universe lit up boiling Baal juice starship's thirdd test flight and trains on the moon all right we had a bunch of stories here there was continuing tests of Starship and this will come back again and again throughout the entire year we got this interesting proposal for building trains on the moon which is going to be part of this sort of ongoing story about building more and more infrastructure on the Moon by various countries including NASA including China and in this case northr Grumman came together with with a proposal for transporting cargo on the surface of the Moon we learned that Bal juice might not be rotating as quickly as we thought and this is because what looks like very rapid rotation might actually just be these giant convection cells on the surface of Bal juice that are boiling and frothing and making it look like it's rotating rapidly but one of the big stories of March and I think one of the biggest stories of the entire year is the James web discovery that dwarf galaxies were probably the ones responsible for clearing out the cosmic fog in the universe and so there's this stage in the early phase of the universe called the age of reionization and this is when all of the atoms in the universe heated up and started to glow and the universe became transparent and astronomers have long been searching what is the cause what created this age of reionization and one of the main goals for James WB was to answer this very question and so in March researchers announced that it looks like dwarf Galaxy early on in the universe pumping out radiation with all of their new star formation was responsible for heating up the gas and causing the age of reionization and so that was one of the biggest stories of the entire year and you agreed April Vera Ruben's camera Dark Energy results from Desi pop three stars from James web and Voyager 1 is fixed so as you know I'm incredibly excited about the ver Rubin telescope and I think I've gotten all of you as excited about ver Rubin as I am and of course we're going to see a ton of news coming out in 2025 as ver Ruben finally comes online and we get those first test images but in 2024 we got all of the instruments the various mirrors all of the parts getting assembled onto ver Rubin and so we were able to bring you each one of the updates and of course the winning vote for one week was when the main camera was installed on the ver ruin Observatory another story that a lot of you were really concerned about was when Voyager one went offline the year before and was spouting nonsense back to Earth and Engineers were able to work through the problem restore Communications with voyager one and demonstrate that they can do troubleshooting bug fixing code repair on a spacecraft that is a light day away from us there's an ongoing search for the first stars in the universe these population three stars the ones that are made of primordial hydrogen and helium they have to be out there but they are enshrouded in gas left over from the formation of the universe and it's possible that we may never see those first Stars directly but astronomers saw evidence that there are those types of stars in the outskirts of galaxies early on in the universe and so we might not be able to see the actual original first stars but we can see the stars that behaved like the first stars and that might be good enough another of the big stories of the entire year is Desi the dark energy survey instrument and this is a measurement of the universe in three dimensions trying to help understand the impact of dark matter and dark energy on the expansion and evolution of the universe over time and even back in April we got the first versions of the Desi survey and we got some really interesting analysis of how the universe has been expanding over time add some new challenges to these traditional models of the universe and you know where we are now in December you're probably hearing a lot of people talking about you know challenges to dark energy and so a lot of this has just been the works over the course of this year as people start to really understand the results from the Desi survey and we're going to see a lot more of that in 2025 when we start to get information from ver Rubin from uid from you know and then into 2027 when we get Nancy Grace Roman telescope so it's a pretty exciting time for cosmology and I think you know we started to see those really interesting cracks open up earlier this year may water on an exoplanet new evidence for Planet 9 Aurora is everywhere and Voyager is doing science again so we had a follow-on story about Voyager 1 in May and you continued to be excited about Voyager 1 and it like is it Nostalgia I mean what is it about us having this kind of almost human-like connection with these first spacecraft for me you know I was like six years old when the voyagers launched and I have been watching through my entire life and especially my entire Journey as being a science journalist watch watching as the voyagers have made incredible discoveries but then also started to fail as they get older and older and I think you know we're all just watching with baited breath as these missions unfold another big unfolding mystery is planet 9 is there a large planet in the outer solar system we see its effects with gravity on various objects in the Kyper belt but so far this object has not been found but of course in 2025 when we get ver Rubin then that is going to be the Observatory that will'll find Planet 9 we got really interesting analysis of the planet wasp 43b by the James web Space Telescope it was able to measure these incredible winds and watch as the clouds are moving around this planet the planet is tidy locked to its star and they found that there weren't a lot of clouds on the day side part of the planet but there was lots of clouds on the night side version and I think this is really interesting when we start to find more and more of these exoplanets many of them going around red D will be titled locked to their star so could they have life on them it really kind of depends on what the environment is like on those planets but I would say the big story of the year was the incredible solar storms that were happening in May and I was in Japan when these solar storms were happening and my wife was back here in Canada and she kept telling me how incredible the storms were and I wasn't a to watch them CU I was in these light polluted skies in Japan but I know a lot of you saw auroras for the first time in your lives this year and that's all thanks to the fact that our sun is in solar maximum so we're still going to be in solar Max for a while into 2025 so enjoy this ride June the most distant Galaxy Starship flight 4 the Nova that never arrived a black hole Awakening in China's Moon sample return we had five stories in June I guess it's like a blue moon except you can have five Fridays in a month we got the fourth Flight of the SpaceX Starship with a super heavy booster and super heavy crashing in the ocean with Starship crashing in the ocean moving towards that momentous flight five which I'm sure we'll talk about in a second it was in June when we started to talk about this upcoming Nova in t Corona Borealis and this is supposed to happen every 80 years and yet here we are well after when this Nova was supposed to happen and we still haven't seen it yet is it going to happen maybe it'll happen 20125 but if it doesn't happen that'll be really interesting because normally these recurrent novas are predictable and you should expect to see them happen on a regular basis and so to not see it happen is also really interesting one thing that's been happening since James Web launched is we get new records for the most distant galaxy in the universe that has been observed so far and in June we got the announcement the confirmation of Jade's gsz14 and this was part of the Jade survey done by the James web Space Telescope and this was confirmed to be the most distant galaxy in the universe seen so far far it was seen about 290 million years after the big bang and this you know we've seen this claim quite a few times I've seen them all the way down to 200 million years but this is the one that we can kind of depend on because it was done with a much more comprehensive survey where they actually got spectroscopic data on this galaxy as well now of course this record will fall probably in 2025 but still it's good to know that the most distant thing that James Webb can see is just less than 300 million years after the big B and in June astronomers reported that they watched a super massive black hole turn on and normally super massive black holes they can be quiet like the one at the heart of the Milky Way or can they be actively feeding quazars that are blasting out material into space and this month astronomers announced that they saw that transition from a quiet black hole to an active black hole for the first time and last but not least the chines got their samples of the Moon back for the chonga 6 Mission this is the one that went to The Far Side of the Moon bringing home samples to Earth for the first time and this is you know this is the sixth Chinese Mission To The Moon And there's going to be many more coming in the coming years July Osiris Rex results a Mars terraforming plant Viper canceled and Signs of Life on Mars one of the big stories that we had been waiting for was the Osiris Rex samples now the Osirus Rex had taken samples from asteroid benu had returned them to Earth but scientists were having a hard time getting into the Osiris Rex sample so they could actually start to study it and so they went through a bunch of really interesting process to finally get a custom tool built that they put into their chamber so they could actually open the capsule and they were able to get it done in July and then start to distribute samples to scientists around the world and then we further reported a lot of the really interesting things that they've been finding in those samples for example that asteroid benu was wet in the past how did that happen Chinese researchers identified a plant that they thought would be able to handle Martian conditions plant is called centria caneris and it's found around the world it's a kind of desert Moss but Chinese researchers found that they could simulate conditions on Mars and that this Moss could handle it and so it could be that this is the kind of plant that we could use to terraform Mars in the future of course the plant doesn't grow without water so the very first thing that you're going to need is water that can actually grow in those conditions in July NASA let us know that the Viper Rover was getting cancelled and this is a Rover that was going to be going to the South Pole of the Moon to help explore help pave the way for the upcoming Artemis mission to the moon and this is a real disappointment I mean the Rover was pretty far along in completion but they canel the budget and there you overlap with other missions that are going to the moon the Canadians are sending a Rover to the South Pole of the moon so it's understandable why its budget got cut but still it kind of sucks that got this far into the process and then got canceled and then we got the announcement that the perseverance Rover found a really fascinating rock on Mars The Rock was found in a region called narva valis and this is thought to be this ancient river flow at the bottom of jezero crater and The Rock has this sort of white calcium sulfate with hematite blobs inside of it and then has little black spots of iron and phosphate and what's really interesting is we get rocks like that on earth when some kind of biological process bacteria is consuming material depositing its waste and you get rocks like this now it's not a clearcut case for Life on Mars but it's one of the most most interesting rocks and we really need to get those samples back from Mars August dark oxygen graphine on the moon water on Mars the wow signal and balj Juice has a companion the big story of the month was the discovery of dark oxygen these are caused by the nodules that are down at the bottom of the ocean these are like just Blobs of metal that have accreted over millions of years and they're scattered across the bottom of the ocean and scientists found that these nodules act like natural batteries they produce bubbles of oxygen as a product of their chemical process and what's really interesting about this is that then they might be filling up this area of the deep ocean which is very oxygen starved with enough oxygen that could help life survive one of the big questions about life on Earth is where did it get started you know some people think it got started on the surface other people think it got started down at the bottom of the ocean around hydrothermal vents but if life did start down at the bottom of the ocean it would need a source of oxygen potentially this has interesting implications for not only the origins of life on Earth but also the potential for origins of life on other planets out there places that are cut off from the atmosphere underneath a thick layer of ice under the water could still have sources of oxygen bubbling up from down below Chinese researchers announced that they had found graphine on the surface of the Moon and we've only known about graphine fairly recently and it's a really interesting industrial chemical that has all kinds of uses but now it appears to form naturally on the surface of the Moon one of the interesting things about Bal juu is that it is a variable star and it has one level of variability which is probably due to its overall pulsations as it grows and shrinks but there's a second signal in its variation and astronomers have always been puzzled why that happens and now researchers propose that that second variation in its brightness is coming from a companion star that is orbiting around Bal juu on an orbit that matches that variation and so there could be this sunlike star that is orbiting just outside the surface of Bal juice and that would explain the secondary brightness change the wow signal is something that people have been puzzling about for decades in 1977 there was this bright flash of radio waves that was detected by a radio telescope an astronomer just wrote wow and circled the part where that big flare of radio waves came from and people have been trying to explain it because any following observations never found another signal coming from that area but in looking through archival data astronomers realized a really good explanation and that is that there was something really bright like maybe a magnetar that sent out a radio pulse or a fast radio burst it went through a cloud of gas in between and created this bright flash of radio waves and astronomers went back and looked through through old archival data from the arbo telescope and found very similar signals to the wow signal but they could have those more mundane explanations wasn't aliens it was a blast of radio waves going through a gas cloud and the wow signal matched all of that and so it looks like we've got a perfectly reasonable non-alien explanation for the wow signal Ro's looking for water on Mars and NASA's Insight Lander turned up evidence of water on Mars a layer of it the problem of course that it is probably more than 10 km deep where the water layer begins so really hard to get to Insight was able to measure Mars Quake seismic activity going through Mars and they were able to detect this Distortion as the seismic waves went through this layer of water September China's Mars sample return the Polaris spacewalk Neptune Mission concept and the Mars zebra Stone we've been hearing more and more disappointing news about the potential for NASA's Mars sample return Mission the budget is getting cut back the timelines are getting pushed forward but we also learned that China is still moving ahead with their plans to retrieve a sample from the surface of Mars now it's not going to be the really fancy version that NASA was planning where you've got all of these perfectly chosen samples taken by the perseverance Rover it's probably just going to be a Lander maybe a Rover grabbing a rock and bringing it home but the plan now is China's going to launch this in 2028 and could bring that sample back from Mars by 2031 we saw the Flight of the Polaris Dawn Mission this is a private mission that went into Earth orbit on a SpaceX crew dragon and we saw the first private spacewalk by Jared isaacman who is the head of Polaris and I guess it's going to be the future NASA administrator if he gets confirmed but he was able to do a spacewalk they were able to go farther from the earth than anybody's been for decades and do a bunch of science experiments while they were up there in orbit and in order to do this SpaceX actually built a new version of their space suits where they were attached with umbilical so they could actually depressurize the cabin and go on their spacewalk you're endlessly fascinated by anyone who's got an idea for how to send a mission to Neptune and they often win the vote every week and back in September we talked about a mission called Arcanum which actually a bit of an older Mission concept but we covered it on Universe today and so we covered it here in space bites and you all loved it but what's great is you've got multiple missions you've got an Orbiter as well as a Lander so you could get not only an orbit around Neptune and some of its moons but actually land on Triton which is one of the most interesting moons in the solar system so I will keep finding stories about Neptune and I'm sure you will keep voting them up and then perseverance found another really cool rock this really neat zebra striped Stone which contains a combination of Ignus and metamorphic rock and it's believed that it was formed higher up on the side of the hill and rolled down and perseverance took a look at it as it was going by and then of course I'm sure it wanted to like collect it put in its pocket leave it in the car uh and then fill the house with rocks which is nothing like me October planets at Bernard Star the largest structure in the universe Starship flight 5 Europa Clipper launch and the results from uclid the biggest story of October was the success ful flight of Starship if5 and this was another test of the super heavy and the Starship but what made this one special was this was the flight where super heavy came back and was caught by mechazilla and even on the flight number six we didn't see that same thing happen and so this was really special kind of blew my mind to see this giant skyscraper fly back to another skyscraper and get caught um and it sort of gives you the sense of what the potential future of space exploration might be with a fully reusable two-stage rocket so you know we're going to see a lot more tests hope people we see a successful catch of Starship and super heavy in 2025 we're part of the local group The Local group is part of the Virgo super cluster and the Virgo super cluster is part of the lanaka super cluster and it turns out the Lan super cluster is part of an even bigger structure which is known as the shapely concentration and astronomers were able to provide convincing evidence this year that we are all moving together and are gravitationally bound with this shapely concentration it has about 50,000 galaxies and it has 10 times the volume of the Lano supercluster Bernard Star is the second closest star to the Sun and back in 2018 astronomers announced the discovery of a planet but then they retracted that statement but then this year they announced three more planets with a lot better evidence and now it looks like both the closest star system to the sun proxim centuri has planets and now the second closest Bernard Star might also have planets we've been watching the uclid mission very carefully this is this Mission from the European space agency that has also gone off to the Earth Sun L2 lrange point and it is using two instruments to make this three dimensional map of the universe it's measuring the shape of galaxies to understand how light is being distorted and bent over vast times to measure the concentrations of mass and then it's measuring the chemical composition of those galaxies to figure out what they're made of and also how fast they're moving away from us and together they're going to produce like the most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe that's ever been seen answer a lot of questions about dark matter and dark energy and in October astronomers released the first partial data from uclid it's only about 1 % of the final survey which is still several years away but this was enough to find about a 100 million objects and will allow astronomers to calibrate their data even do some beginning science from this test data but over the coming years we're going to see a lot more interesting information come out of uclid and then the other big story of the month was the launch of the Europa Clipper and this is this Mission that's going to Jupiter's moon Europa now it has a very long Journey it's not going to get there until 2030 it has flybys to make we're going to see a flyby of Mars and then a flyby of Earth and then in 2030 it will arrive at Europa now it's not going to be going to orbit around Europa it's going to be following this very long orbit that brings it close to Jupiter and Europa and then back out again to keep it safe now it's going to do a lot of the standard science we're going to get a lot of great pictures from the surface of Europa but what makes this Mission different is that it contains a radar system that will allow it to see under the ice and hopefully it'll be able to map out pockets of water under the ice on Europa help us understand where does this ice shell begin and end where does the ocean begin what's under the ice on Europa November Miranda has a subsurface ocean a steam world the ozone hole is shrinking and a star from another galaxy we talked about the discovery of an Under Ice ocean on mimus now it looks like there's also an under the ice ocean on Miranda which is one of Uranus's moons you know with this there are probably under the ice oceans on dozens of objects in the solar system uh I don't know what like the the full list is right now but there's a lot I would say the most interesting exoplanet discovery of the year was GJ 9827 and this is a giant world it's much larger than the earth it's much more massive than the earth it's orbiting a lot more closely to its star than the earth is but James web was able to reveal that its atmosphere is filled with steam with hot water vapor and so we're looking for examples of Worlds that have liquid water on their surface so finding a world with an atmosphere that's almost entirely made of steam is a good step in that direction and so hopefully eventually soon we'll find a water world and some good news the ozone layer is shrinking decades ago scientists realized that a coolant that we use chlorofluorocarbons is causing a degradation of the Earth's ozone layer and so countries got together in 1987 and they ratified an agreement that they would cut back on that coolant and since then the ozone layer has been recovering and in 2024 the ozone layer was the seventh smallest that it has been in since measurements began and they could expect that it could fully recover by 2066 and so it shows that Humanity can work together to solve some of these larger existential threats that face the entire planet we got the first image of a star in another galaxy now obviously we've seen pinpoints of light in other galaxies but this is a case where a telescope was able to resolve multiple pixels across the surface of a star now the star is called W g64 it's located en large magul in a cloud and it's a monster it's about 2,000 times bigger than the Sun and so even though it is very far away the European Southern observatory's very large telescope was able to resolve features on the surface of this monster star you're probably wondering why I didn't mention Starship flight six and that was because this star in another galaxy actually beat it out in the vote so still it gets an honorable mention December robots that go under the ice NASA's new administrator why Ingenuity crashed and a possible trapis 1B atmosphere although we're all really excited about the Europa Clipper Mission going to Europa it's going to be mapping out that ice mapping out that subsurface ocean people always want to know how are we going to get under that ice and actually EXP it and NASA is testing out these really cool robots that can go and swim underneath the ice on places like Europa and they're actually testing them here on Earth right now now who knows if they will ever be used on a mission but it's good to know how it could be done we got the announcement for president-elect Trump's choice for the new NASA administrator and this is Jared isman we talked about him earlier with the Polaris Dawn Mission and you know right now we have no idea what Jared isin is going to be like he is definitely a big space nerd he doesn't have a lot of bureaucratic government experience some people think that's a good thing some people think that might be a bad thing so really we're all just going to be waiting to see how well he turns out in this job of leading NASA in 2025 and Beyond the very first story that I mentioned in this episode was the final flight of Ingenuity and so in December we learned what happened to Ingenuity the helicopter was flying in a region that was was really hard to distinguish surface features as it was coming down to land it hit this Dune on a slope and that caused a lot of stress on its rotors the rotors broke off and it was no longer able to fly and NASA released this final report telling us what happened to Ingenuity and I mean the fact that we got 72 flights out of this helicopter is incredible and any future mission that goes to Mars has got to be able to take a helicopter with it in fact NASA is testing out some really interesting much larger versions of of these helicopters and so I'm sure we're going to have a lot of really interesting helicopter stories in 2025 and we've been talking a lot about whether or not there are atmospheres on the trapis one planets earlier this year astronomers used James Webb and have ruled out the potential for atmospheres on trapis 1B and trapis 1 C and are moving on to the rest of the planets in the system but other astronomers have said well maybe there could be some explanations for atmospheres still on those planets and so it shows that there's still some room for interpretation there's still going to be some arguments back and forth between astronomers and I'll bet you in 2025 we're going to get a ton of news about the planets around trapis one all right those were all of the top stories for 2024 as voted by you of course we'll keep doing this in 2025 we'll put up a new poll within about 24 hours of when we release an episode of space bites go ahead take a second vote tell us what you thought was the best story we will celebrate it and maybe we'll do this again in 2025 all right I had an amazing year I hope you all did too and I will see you next year