2020 Was a Great Year for Things Trying to Leave this Planet.

While things were pretty rough here on Earth in 2020, it was an amazing year for space exploration. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights and remind ourselves of some of the truly awesome things humans are capable of:

Mars, imaged from the Pic-du-Midi Observatory in France on Halloween 2020. Mars was particularly close to Earth this year, making for some stunning views from telescopes on the ground. Image credit shown above, posted by one of the photographers, French astronomer Jean-Luc Dauvergne on Twitter.

In July we saw a veritable fleet of spacecraft set off of Mars: NASA’s Perseverance rover, China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter+rover+lander combo, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter. This is probably the most crowded a martian launch window has been since the days of the Space Race, and certainly the most multi-national. To date only NASA has managed to successfully land a mission on Mars — although nitpickers might argue that the Soviet Mars 3 mission, which operated for a mere 110 seconds and didn’t really send back any data, was technically “successful.” So, if China’s mission goes well, it will make them the second (or third) country ever to operate a rover on the surface of Mars. All three of these missions will arrive at Mars in February 2021, so keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned for updates.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule at Cape Canaveral before the Crew-1 launch on November 14, 2020. Image credit: SpaceX

(Image: © SpaceX/Elon Musk via Twitter)