Space Exploration Highlights Since 2022.

Dr. T. Dowling, UofL

The year 2022 marked 6 decades of interplanetary exploration and we are already 3 years into the 7th decade. Deployed in January 2022, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been on a run of major discoveries, including unexpectedly bright and dusty galaxies and supermassive black holes in the early universe, methane and carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere (K2-18b), and ice water in our asteroid belt. In 2023, India became the 4th country to successfully land on the Moon— and the first in the south polar region—where its lunar rover discovered sulfur, with implications for past volcanism. In 2024, science fiction became reality when SpaceX captured its returning Super Heavy booster at the launch pad, in spectacular fashion. The present year has seen many highs and lows, including Firefly Aerospace’s successful landing on the Moon at Mare Crisium, Intuitive Machine’s tipped-over landing at Mons Mouton, and Japan’s Hakuto-R crash landing at Mare Frigoris. The talk will conclude with a peek at upcoming missions.