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…