This Year In Space (2010)

As we welcome in the New Year we also say goodbye to 2009, which was a very good year for space exploration. The Hubble Space Telescope was repaired, Herschel & Planck were launched, and five very successful space shuttle missions were conducted. But not only was the year technically rewarding we also had the first tweet from space by Mike Massimino (@Astro_Mike) in June, baby Bresnik was born while her father Randy Bresnik was conducting an EVA on board Atlantis on STS-129. There were also many other monumental happenings and anniversaries. The first European commander, Frank De Winne and the first time two Canadians were on board the station, Bob Thrisk and Julie Payette.

But as we look forward to 2010 there are many great missions planned and I’m sure many wonderful and intriguing discoveries will be made. Some of the planned missions include:

GOES-P, which is almost ready for launch in February, GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) will be used to forecast the weather on earth.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to be launched in February will observe small parts of the suns atmosphere at a time to understand how the sun affects the earth and near-earth space.

The Glory mission launching in October is the world’s first satellite dedicated to observing how aerosols and solar irradiance affect the ozone layer.

But with all silver linings there is a cloud, which for this year will be the retirement of the Space Shuttle. The shuttles started out as nothing more than an answer to “why can’t we have a reusable spacecraft?” which was asked almost 40 years ago but now they are one of the most versatile spacecrafts in use today. Having docked with Mir, the ISS, Hubble and even delivering Hubble to orbit along with modules and space parts to the ISS. Their last planned flight will be with space shuttle Discovery on STS-133.