By any measure, 2021 was a busy year in space exploration and technologies, with global superpowers and the mega-rich duking it out for mastery of the cosmos. Here are some of the highlights from the year.
ISS gets new modules and hosts space movie
Nauka, aka the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module, docked with the International Space Station (ISS) in July, after 14 years of delays and setbacks. The long-awaited launch was followed by some drama, after an accidental firing of the module’s thrusters sent the ISS into a spin. The crew had to fire the thrusters on another Russian module, the Zvezda, to counter the rotation.
Several months later, another Russian module, Prichal, hooked up with the Nauka. This time, the coupling went off without a hitch.
Apart from their scientific value, the new modules added some much-needed room, as the ageing space station got increasingly more crowded, with multiple American, Russian, and European missions docking with the ISS. The current cohort of astronauts at the station arrived on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and two craft launched by Elon Musk’s space exploration firm, SpaceX.
One mission in particular grabbed headlines this year: in October, the Russian space agency Roscosmos sent a film crew to the ISS on a 12-day mission, during which they shot footage for the first-ever movie filmed in space. Cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky told RT he hopes the film will help increase public interest in space exploration.
Rival US and China rovers land on Mars
After a 300-million-mile voyage from Earth, NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Martian soil in February. Perseverance is the fifth American rover to scour the surface of Mars and has been set to work collecting rock and soil samples and taking more than 100,000 images of the Red Planet.