NASA’s 2019 in Review: Artemis, Marsquakes and the First All-Woman Spacewalk

NASA's end-of-2019 video looked back on a year that set a bold new goal for human exploration with the Artemis program, celebrated Apollo's first steps on the Moon, and began the 20th year of people living and working continuously in space.

Back to the Moon

• Artemis was reshaped with a new target: land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024 — returning American astronauts within five years.
• The Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative picked commercial Moon landers to deliver science and technology demonstrations to the surface in 2021, work that could clear the way for astronauts.
• VIPER, a mobile lunar robot, will gather data on water ice to help build the first global maps of the Moon's water.
• NASA talked with American companies about reusable lunar landers and other systems for human missions, and chose a company to provide power and propulsion for Gateway, an outpost in lunar orbit from which astronauts will travel to and from the surface.
• The ride there — Orion, its European Space Agency-built service module, the RS-25 engines and the Space Launch System rocket — made major progress in building and testing for the uncrewed Artemis I flight test.
• New spacesuits were unveiled that fit better and move more freely for exploring the lunar surface.

Mars

• InSight measured and recorded a likely "marsquake" — the first ever.
• The Mars Helicopter went through rigorous testing ahead of its launch on the Mars 2020 rover — which will also carry more than 10 million names of people on Earth, etched on dime-size microchips.

Humans in space

• The International Space Station began its 20th consecutive year with people aboard.
• Spacewalks included the first ever by an all-woman team, a series of complex outings to repair a cosmic ray detector, and one to help install a new docking adapter for future spacecraft, including commercial crew vehicles from Boeing and SpaceX.
• SpaceX's Crew Dragon docked with the station for the first time during its uncrewed test flight for NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Boeing's CST-100 Starliner launched on December 20 on its own uncrewed test but couldn't dock, and NASA and Boeing are learning from that flight.
• Five commercial cargo missions by Northrop Grumman and SpaceX delivered more than 32,000 pounds of experiments, spacewalk tools and supplies.
• A new policy opened the station to commercial business.
• Results were published from the landmark Twins Study of astronaut brothers Mark and Scott Kelly, data that could help keep crews healthy on missions to the Moon and Mars.

The solar system and beyond

• New Horizons opened the year with a record-breaking flyby of a Kuiper Belt object 4 billion miles from the Sun.
• NASA announced a mission to Saturn's moon Titan to search for the building blocks of life.
• The airborne observatory SOFIA detected helium hydride — the first kind of molecule ever to form in the universe — in a planetary nebula about 3,000 light-years away.
• NASA helped capture the first image of a black hole and its shadow.
• Hubble data showed, for the first time, water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our solar system that lies in its star's habitable zone.
• TESS found three new worlds 73 light-years away — one nearly Earth-size and two "mini-Neptunes."
• The first data from Parker Solar Probe's record-close passes of the Sun revealed new insights into solar activity that can affect astronauts and technology.
• An air-launched mission (on a Pegasus rocket) set out to study the ionosphere, whose processes can disrupt radio, satellites and astronauts' health.

Technology

• A SpaceX Falcon Heavy carried several NASA demonstrations: less toxic spacecraft fuel, new ways to navigate in space, processes affecting space communications, and studies of the space environment around Earth.
• Three free-flying robots reached the station on Northrop Grumman's Cygnus to test zero-gravity technologies and take over routine chores, freeing astronauts for other work.
• The 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge had teams building sustainable shelters for exploration, including on the Moon and Mars.

Earth from space

• Station cameras watched Hurricane Dorian, which reached Category 5 and devastated the northern Bahamas.
• Data from a Japanese satellite produced a map to help officials assess damage from two strong Southern California earthquakes.
• Terra imaged California's Kincade Fire, driven by Diablo winds of nearly 100 miles per hour.
• A new high-resolution imaging suite sent to the station can identify natural and human-made materials on the surface, useful for resource exploration, agriculture, forestry and more.

Aviation

• The X-57 Maxwell uses electric propulsion that could raise efficiency while cutting emissions and noise.
• The X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology project finished flight-testing software and imaging that let pilots fly safely without a forward-facing window.
• The Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) project completed its final and most complex season of tests on bringing drones safely into low-altitude airspace.

Honoring history

• The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 was marked with a NASA TV special and events around the country.
• The Apollo Mission Operations Control Room was restored so visitors can see it exactly as it looked during the Moon missions.
• The street in front of NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., was renamed "Hidden Figures Way," honoring the women whose calculations were vital to the early space program.

Sources

Based on "What Happened This Year at NASA" (2019), a NASA video in the NASA Image and Video Library; a work of the United States government in the public domain.