10. The Moon Implicated in the Sinking of the Titanic
There may have been an unindicted co-conspirator in the sinking of the legendary Titanic:
the moon. In a paper published in March, two physicists from Texas
State University made that case, beginning with an improbable
convergence months before the Titanic set sail—on Jan. 4, 1912,
to be exact. On that day, the sun and the moon lined up with the Earth
in such a way that their combined gravity led to a cycle of unusually
high and low tides. By itself, the phenomenon is not that uncommon. But
at the same time, the moon just happened to make its closest approach to
Earth in 1,400 years. Worse still, on Jan. 3, the Earth made its
closest approach to the sun, which happens every year at that time. So
the tides on Jan. 4 were not just high, but higher than they’d been in
many hundreds of years. The iceberg that claimed the Titanic
might have been among many old ones that had become grounded in the
relatively shallow waters around Labrador and Newfoundland. The historic
tides would have freed a number of them, turning the shipping lanes
into the deadly minefield they became that April. And one of those
mines—in the wrong spot at the wrong time—sent the Titanic to the bottom, and into history
9. NASA Gets Two New Hubbles–For Free
It
hardly bears mentioning that the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is one
of the most extraordinarily successful scientific instruments of all
time. All good things come to an end, however, and the Hubble is nearing
the final years of its useful life. But hold the funeral dirges: In
June, the National Science Foundation revealed the existence of not one
but two pristine, Hubble-class space telescopes still in their original
wrappings in a warehouse in Rochester, N.Y. The pair were originally
built for the National Reconnaissance Office,
the agency in charge of spy satellites, to look down at Earth rather
than up into space. But the NRO has moved on to bigger and better
instruments, and decided to hand the telescopes over. It’s not clear
what NASA will do with this astonishing gift—how they’ll upgrade the
telescopes or when they’ll launch them. For now, they’re still trying to
wrap their brains around the fact that they own the things at all. “It
just blew me away when I heard about this,” said Princeton
astrophysicist David Spergel, when the gift was announced. “I knew
nothing about it.”
8. Nanoparticles in the Moon’s Soil
Even
before astronauts landed on the moon, they knew the soil would be
something special. With no atmosphere to intercept incoming
micrometeorites, it has been subjected to a 4.5 billion year bombardment
that has produced a layer of dust far finer than confectioner’s sugar.
That dust, the Apollo crewmen found when they went out to play in it,
did some strange things: it rose above the surface when disturbed and
hung there far longer than could be explained by the moon’s weak
gravity; it crept deep into the weave and cracks of virtually anything
it touched and clung there as if adhesively attached. What’s more, it
was filled with exquisitely fine green and orange glass beads — products
of the superheated melting and cooling that followed impacts. In 2012,
Geologist Marek Zbik of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane,
Australia, used a nanotomograph—which didn’t even exist when the Apollo
crews flew—to study a soil sample brought back by one of the missions.
He found that those microscopic beads are filled with nanoparticles,
with an electrostatic charge that accounts for the soil’s tendency to
float. The particles are also chemically active and electrically sticky,
which explains why they could never simply be brushed off of an
astronaut’s uniform. Even forty years after the great lunar flights, the
science just keeps on coming.
7. North Korea’s Satellite Flop
North
Korea rarely has much to show off. Every 20 years or so, they upgrade
to a new Kim, and the product rollout is pretty much the crazy,
hermit-state equivalent of the iPad 3 launch. In 2012, however,
Pyongyang had a whole different kind of launch in mind and took the
unheard of step of polishing up the Dear Leader statues and throwing
open the doors to the international press, as the country attempted its
first satellite launch. It was a dud. According to U.S. and Japanese
defense officials, the rocket failed mid-flight, breaking up in the
atmosphere. The satellite the North intended to launch was barely above
the hobbyist level—a 2,200 lb (1,000 kg) cube covered with solar panels
and topped by a high-definition camera. But the rocket, a long-range
Unha 3, was a formidable piece of ordnance—more than suitable for
carrying warheads if not spacecraft. So don’t snicker at L’il Kim’s
sword-rattling—but don’t be too impressed by his wrong stuff space
program either.
6. Geysers on Mars
The
rule for space aesthetics has always been clear: First comes the
science, then comes the art. This year, that idea was proven again with
sensational images shot by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
showing the predictable — if beautiful — rusty dunes of the Martian
surface, sculpted like snowdrifts from the planet’s tenuous but
persistent wind. The scene is broken up, however, by strange, black,
spidery blemishes scattered randomly about the surface. The dark
splatters show up seasonally and are thought to be a form of carbon
dioxide geysers, which erupt out of the ground as the CO2 turns from ice
in the Martian winter to gas in the summer. The pictures exploded on
the Internet—and people became smarter for reading the accompanying
stories, reconfirming the power of the beautiful to help popularize the
technical.
5. Ocean on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
There’s
something innately enchanting about the Enceladan Ocean—if only because
of its lyrical name. But don’t expect to go sunning yourself on its
banks anytime soon. It’s located 888 million miles (1.4 billion km) from
Earth on Saturn’s bitterly cold moon Enceladus. Oh, and the ocean is
buried beneath a thick rind of surface ice too. But the discovery of the
body of otherworldly water—made by the Cassini spacecraft, which has
been orbiting Saturn since 2004—was nonetheless big news. Enceladus is
intermittently squeezed and stretched by the gravitational pull of its
sister moons Dione and Tethys as they pass. This leads to ice volcanoes
and constant resurfacing of the moon’ frozen crust. Cassini images of
that crust revealed cracks known as tiger stripes that come from the
constant flexing. All of this suggests a world that’s so elastic that
the conclusion that the moon is home to a massive water ocean—perhaps a
globe-girdling one—became inescapable. Such a warm (at least above
freezing) body of water could well be an incubator for life, provided
you’ve got enough time. And the 4.5 billion years Saturn and its moons
have been around ought to be more than sufficient.
4. Discovery of Earthlike Planet Around Alpha Centauri
Exoplanets can be hard to keep straight. The eight planets
in our solar system are nothing next to the 2,300-plus possible planets
astronomers have discovered circling other stars. But that mass
anonymity changed in October, with a major new discovery announced in Nature. A team of exoplaneteers based at Switzerland’s
Geneva Observatory spotted an exoplanet orbiting in the Alpha Centauri
starsystem — our sun’s nearest celestial neighbor, and a favored
destination for generations of sci-fi writers. Just four light years
from Earth, Alpha Centauri could be reached, in theory, within a human
lifetime—provided the right technology were invented. What’s more, the
planet—dubbed Alpha Centauri Bb—is approximately the same size and
perhaps the same composition as Earth. The hitch: it orbits only 3.72
million miles (6 million km) from its home star, compared to Earth,
which stands at a cooler—and more life-sustaining—remove of 93 million
(15 million km) from the sun.
3. Dawn Spacecraft Geads Off to Ceres
It’s
easy to forget about the massive swarm of asteroids that orbit the sun
between Mars and Jupiter. There’s a river of them after all, and the
overwhelming majority are little more than rocks. But Ceres and Vesta
are different—the size of Texas and Arizona respectively. Ceres is so
big, in fact, that it qualifies as a dwarf planet, the same as Pluto. In
July 2011, the Dawn spacecraft went into orbit around Vesta and stayed
there until September 2012, after which it blasted away on a course to
Ceres—which it will reach in February 2015—becoming the first ship of
its kind to orbit two bodies. Actually “blasted away” is not quite
accurate. In truth, Dawn just putt-putted away, relying on a thin stream
of propulsion from its innovative ion engine. The spacecraft’s mission
is thus equal parts important science and exceedingly nifty
engineering—a NASA twofer if ever there were one.
2. Dragon Spacecraft Docks with International Space Station
American
space shuttles and Russian Soyuz ships have docked with the
International Space Station (ISS) any number of times, but until last
May, a guy named Elon had never done it. Elon is Elon Musk, the founder
of the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation—or SpaceX. And while
he’s no space traveler himself, his Dragon spacecraft became the
first-ever private ship to dock with the ISS, beginning a scheduled
dozen unmanned resupply missions, with plans for manned missions to
follow. If Musk does launch crews—he says it will happen by 2015—the
long-discussed and always-deferred manned commercial conquest of space
will at last have begun.
1. Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars
Americans
have put machines on Mars before, but never one as big or ambitious as
the SUV-sized Curiosity rover that touched down in GaleCrater in August.
The landing, a live-streamed global event, was an improbable bit of
daredevil flying. The descent pod came to a near-full stop a dozen or so
yards above the surface, and the one-ton car was lowered on cables like
an extraterrestrial marionette. Curiosity has two years of driving and
investigating ahead of it, but just by getting where it was supposed to
go in the first place it has marked itself a triumph.
