The Year in Space and Physics

A look back at the trends and news of 2024

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare — as seen in the bright flash on the right — on May 14, 2024. Credit: NASA/SDO

Every week I send my email subscribers a newsletter discussing advances in space and physics. I am sharing this look back at the year’s newsletters with all of you on Medium. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do so for free by clicking here.

The past year has shown the remarkable things humanity can achieve. Two, in particular, stand out. First, in October, was the capture of Starship mere minutes after it had launched: a feat in which engineers steered a rocket the size of a twenty-story building back to Earth, and then settled it, gently, on a waiting frame.

The other, accomplished just days ago, was a probe’s flight through the corona of the Sun. No other spacecraft has ventured so close to a star, nor has one ever reached such high speeds — the Solar Probe, as it neared the Sun, traversed almost two hundred kilometres in a single second.

There have been other fantastic achievements this year, of course. NASA sent the Europa Clipper toward Jupiter; ESA retrieved the first scientific data from its Euclid telescope. The James Webb telescope observed the most distant galaxies known, and scientists laid out plans to build new particle colliders to probe the foundations of nature.