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1. The biggest
developments in space
exploration in the past
year

2.  We’ve had a rather breathless 12 months of
space travel, taking us from the moon to
Pluto and beyond. Here we look at the
greatest developments of recent times.

3. Cumar: Ireland’s first-ever
space mission
 Cumar’s mission, MaKenna-Lawlor said, would be to
gain new understanding of space weather.
 Negotiations are in progress to include in the
spacecraft’s payload experiments from Chinese,
Canadian, German, Japanese, Slovakian and British
teams, each aiming to gain further insights into
different aspects of space weather and its effect on
society, the planet and technology.
 In addition to scientific equipment,Cumar will be
carrying a sculpture already commissioned from an
Irish sculptor, who will use space-qualified materials
for its construction.

4. Prof Susan McKenna-Lawlor
speaking at Inspirefest 2015

5. ISS: A year-long pursuit
 Right now, whizzing above your head a few times a
day, two astronauts are busy working away on the
International Space Station (ISS).
 This is nothing new, the ISS has housed dozens of
astronauts over the years, who have handed the
baton over to replacements every few months and
come back down to Earth with stories to tell and
pictures to show.
 However, for NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and
cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, things are markedly
different.They are seven months into a year-long
mission on the spacecraft, something never done
before.

6. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly
and Russian cosmonaut
Mikhail Kornienko. Photo via
NASA

7.  The trials and tribulations their bodies are
going through are estimated, but not fully
known.The logic is, if humans ever want to
get to Mars, we’re going to have to spend a
long time in space. So why not learn what
effects that can have on the human body?
 While in space, the duo are expected to
develop blurry vision, lose their balance, see
a bone density reduction never experienced
before, enjoy a melting away of muscle
mass and develop an undercooked heart,
which has to work far less in space to pump
blood around the body.
 At the halfway point of their mission,
NASA revealed the messy details of the
duo’s stay in space.
Amongst other things, the
duo will each see almost
11,000 sunrises and sunsets,
millions of stars and some
truly incredible views, and
drop 180 pounds worth of
poop back down to Earth.
They will do more than 700
hours of exercise, which you
clever clogs will realise is a
couple of hours a day, and will
run 648 miles on a treadmill.

9. Hubble Telescope is now 25
years of age
 NASA’s HubbleTelescope was sent up to
space back in 1990 to start taking
photographs, giving us a glimpse into worlds
we’d barely heard of, or never knew existed.
 In 25 years, it has delighted us with pictures
of nebulas, stars, clusters, eclipses and no end
of astrological phenomena.

10. Floating just above Earth, it’s consistently upgraded
and maintained camera lenses offer us greater and
greater shots of the universe around us.
And just like anyone else’s landmark birthday,
we celebrated it by looking back at photos and
accomplishments of old.

11. Hubble images via NASA and
The Hubble Heritage

12. MESSENGER’s farewell
pictures Back in April, NASA’s MESSENGER
spacecraft spiralled towards a destructive,
crushing death amid its last tour of
Mercury. Responsible for pretty much all
of our real knowledge of the planet
nearest the sun, MESSENGER had been
circling Mercury for years taking photos of
its surface.
However, with fuel running low, the
doomed spacecraft prepared itself for its
final trip down to death, sending us
majestic pictures along the way.
Standing for ‘Mercury Surface, Space
Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging’
spacecraft, MESSENGER sent us this tie-
dye of Mercury’s surface, hours before its
demise.
Mercury image, via NASA/Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of
Washington

13. Planets beyond Pluto?
Way back in January, scientists found two
planets, potentially as big as Earth, lurking
beyond Pluto in our solar system, in a
discovery that “may be truly revolutionary
for astronomy”.
The discovery involved measurements of
rocks located well beyond Neptune. A belt of
space rocks, known as ‘extreme trans-
Neptunian objects’ (ETNO), show
unexpected symmetry, according to
scientists who have been scouring the solar
system looking for everything and anything.
Some of these ETNOs appear to be orbiting in a defined path
reminiscent of our moon.
By analysing the effects of what’s called the Kozai mechanism –
which deals with large objects having smaller ones, much further
away, orbiting around its gravitational pull – the researchers have
thus theorised that just beyond what they can see could well be
some more planets.

14. Water on Enceladus
For years, Jupiter’s icy moon Europa has
intrigued many as to whether life could exist
beneath its surface, but now with this discovery
of hydrothermal activity on Enceladus, NASA
said the implications of this find offer
‘unprecedented scientific possibilities’.
Hydrothermal activity is a common occurrence
in our own oceans, where seawater infiltrates
and reacts with the planet’s rocky crust and
emerges as a heated, mineral-laden solution.
An artist’s rendering of possible hydrothermal activity on and under
the seafloor of Enceladus’ subsurface ocean, based on recently
published results from NASA’s Cassini mission. Image via NASA/JPL

15. Water on Mars
Step back Jupiter’s moon, try Mars’ Mars.
After much speculation, NASA finally
confirmed last month that the Martian
surface of Mars does indeed have liquid
water running on it, which potentially
brings new hope for the discovery of life
on the red planet.
It seems rather timely given the
complementary release of The
Martian film (read our review here), with
interest in Mars at a level not seen in
decades.
The liquid water was discovered to be running down the ridges of canyons and
crater walls during the planet’s summer months, with it having left visible streaks
down their slopes.
However, the actual origin of the water remains a mystery, with some
suggestions being that it is originating from vast underground salty aquifers,
Martian ice or even condensation from the planet’s thin atmosphere.

16. Earth 2.0
What a summer. In July, NASA discovered a
new planet with strikingly similar features to
our own. It was dubbed, rather
unimaginatively, Earth 2.0, and its discovery
sent everyone’s imaginations wild.
Kepler-452b, as the planet has been labelled by
the agency, is in a solar system very similar to
our own and is the right distance from its star
to potentially be habitable.The planet is 6bn
years old, 60pc larger than Earth and receives
10pc more energy from its star, which is 1.5bn
years older and 20pc brighter than our sun,
though has the same temperature.
“Today we’re announcing the discovery of an
exoplanet that as far as we can tell is a pretty
close cousin of Earth,” said John Grunsfeld,
associate administrator of NASA’s Science
Mission Directorate inWashington. “It’s the
closest so far.”

17. Its 385-day orbit is only 5pc longer that Earth’s, while its
mass and composition have yet to be determined, previous
NASA research suggests that worlds this size have a good
chance of being rocky.
Don’t pack your bags just yet, though. An Interstellar-like
jaunt across the galaxy isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
It’s 1,400 light years away.To put that into perspective,
Pluto is only five light hours away.
“You and I probably won’t be travelling to these planets, but
our children’s children’s children could be,” NASA’s Jeff
Coughlin said. “This gives us something to aim for.”

18. Pluto. Pluto, Pluto, Pluto.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft left Earth nine years
ago. In that time we’ve seen smartphones revolutionise
communications, renewable energy developments
point to a manageable future without fossil fuels and
economic collapses wreck economies all over the world.
Twitter has emerged, Instagram too. One Direction is
now a thing, and a famous lion martyr has changed from
Mufasa to Cecil.
Throughout all of this, New Horizons kept plugging
away. Pluto was downgraded from ‘planet’ to ‘not
planet’, New Horizons kept plugging away.
With a CPU smaller than you ever could imagine, it kept
plugging away.Then, during the summer (have we said
‘what a summer?’) it finally made it.

19. Despite a couple of scares in the hours
leading up to its homing in on Pluto, it
sent back some incredibly well-defined
images of the planet (I mean ‘planet’ in
the terms of MyVery Educated Mother
Just Showed Us Nine Planets, people).
Since then it has taken in Pluto’s moons,
too, but now it’s on its way into the
beyond.
We enjoyed this, perhaps more than the
lovestruck former planet.

20. Philae, Rosetta and an
amazing comet landing
Last November, almost 12 months ago,
the Rosetta spacecraft released its helper Philae,
which floated down onto a comet and landed.
Okay, it wasn’t as smooth as that, and its crash
landing was quite the event, but it got there, it
reported back, and humankind achieved one of
its finest accomplishments. Step back, modern
sewerage systems, go away penicillin, we just
won the best game of tag ever.
Chasing down a comet, photographing it,
measuring it, then landing a worker on it.
Bravo. Philae landed in the shade and
hadn’t a whole lot of juice after its cliff-
smashing landing, but it actually woke up
again during the summer, chatting
with Rosetta and keeping us informed.

21. The end thank you for
watching
SUBMITTED BY:
OYANGOREN,RODERICK
BRILLO,JULIE
BUHAT,MARYL
BARTIQUEL,IRISH
SUBMITTED TO:
MR.RICHARD ARRIESGADO