by Fraser Cain

Posted December 31, 2001

2001 was a busy year for space exploration - from Dennis Tito's $20 million tourist trip to the International Space Station to NEAR's incredible landing on Asteroid Eros. Join Universe Today as we look back at the last year and remember the most important events that shaped the space industry during 2001... in no particular order, and based solely on Fraser's fickle judgement.

Without a doubt, the top news story for the year 2001 was the terrorist attacks that led to the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001 - it's received nearly constant coverage on every television channel you visit and web page you surf. The impact of September 11th on the space industry was almost a footnote when compared to the far-reaching consequences of this tragedy.

Within a day of the attack, NASA released photographs of a smouldering Manhattan taken by astronauts on board the International Space Station. And a few days later SpaceImages released high-resolution photos that clearly showed the smoking hole that once was the World Trade Center.

The launch of the space shuttle Endeavour in early December was carried out with intense security - both on the ground and in the air, including a restricted airspace that extended 55 km away from the launch pad. Endeavour carried 6,000 US flags; they'll be distributed to families of the September 11 disaster.

Multi-millionaire Dennis Tito made most of us incredibly jealous when he fulfilled a lifelong dream to visit space. After forking over a reported $20 million(US) and many months of training at Russia's Star City cosmonaut training facility, Tito got his shot at space in late April 2001. Tito joined cosmonauts Talgat Musabayev and Yuri Baturin as they launched on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to pay a week long visit to the International Space Station.

NASA was opposed to Tito's visit to the station, but gave the mission a tentative "thumbs up" a few days before the April 28th launch date. Tito had some ground rules: he was ordered to stay to the Russian parts of the station - visits to the rest of the station would require a chaperone.

Tito's week in space went by smoothly, and already more millionaires and celebrities are lining up to pay their cash and step into his tourist spaceboots. If only I had a spare $20 million kicking around...

Nearly a year since it first arrived at Asteroid Eros, the NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous)-Shoemaker spacecraft was given an insane assignment: to land on an asteroid. NEAR-Shoemaker had already spent its time buzzing around the asteroid, delivering the highest-resolution images ever taken of an asteroid (or space peanut).

On February 12th, NASA gave the command and NEAR-Shoemaker fired its thrusters several times to decrease its relative speed to only 8 kph. Slow enough, they hoped, that the spacecraft would land gently on the surface of the asteroid and not smash into a zillion pieces. It took photos all the way down, and amazingly survived its "landing" (the spacecraft was never intended to land, and so it sort of backed itself onto the asteroid). After it had received the last set of photos, NASA shut down the spacecraft, leaving it permanently parked on the asteroid it had orbited and studied so intensely.

After its two previous missions to Mars ended in disaster, NASA was under intense pressure to actually get a spacecraft to the Red Planet intact. It was the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, launched on April 7th, that would finally break the space agency's losing streak.

Odyssey arrived at Mars on October 23rd and successfully performed an aerobraking maneuver to place it into a wide orbit around the Red Planet. Right up until the end of 2001, Odyssey continued to scrape against Mars' atmosphere, turning its elliptical orbit ever more circular. These maneuvers will continue until mid-January 2002 when the probe finally arrives at its final altitude and begins its real job on Mars: searching for evidence of water.

Deep Space 1 was another spacecraft pushed into a role it was never designed for. Originally created to test a collection of prototype technologies including an efficient ion engine and an automated navigation system, NASA decided the probe should snap a few close-ups while hurtling around our Solar System.

On September 22, Deep Space 1 made its closest pass to Comet Borrelly (another space peanut), and took some of the most detailed photographs ever taken of a comet. Once again, this was a role that NASA hadn't originally intended for the spacecraft, so there was the possibility that Deep Space 1 would be torn apart by dust as it careened past the comet. Shortly after the successful flyby, NASA cut off communications with DS1.

I just want to go on record here and say... I told you so. I think I nagged readers enough about the upcoming Leonid meteor storm in the introduction of three separate issues of Universe Today. Those of you who heeded my advice were treated to the best display of meteors since 1966 (amazingly enough, we had perfectly clear skies here in Vancouver, so I was able to enjoy them too). Many skywatchers reported hundreds and even thousands of meteors an hour - no one who saw them was disappointed.

The Leonid meteor shower kicked into high gear during the weekend of November 17-18th, when Earth ploughed through three separate clouds of dust left over by Comet Tempel-Tuttle. If you missed this shower, don't worry. I hear we're due for another great one in 2099 ;)

The Russians had been threatening to deorbit Mir for years, but always seemed to change their mind, finding some commercial use for the station at the last minute (Dennis Tito was originally supposed to visit the Mir and not the International Space Station). Well, we never thought they'd actually follow through on their plans, but on March 23rd the Russians crashed the hardy space station into the South Pacific Ocean.

All told, Mir had been aloft for 15 years (much longer than originally planned), and the astronauts and cosmonauts who spent time on board the station had learned to respect and fear it. Terror reached a peak in 1997 when a fire on board the station nearly killed the crew, and shortly after a Progress cargo ship crashed into the Spektr module, leaking atmosphere into space.

Despite previous problems, the final deorbit maneuver went flawlessly: the station streaked through the atmosphere before it crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Do svidaniya Mir.

Lucky Africans were treated to a total solar eclipse that swept across the continent on June 21st. And they weren't disappointed. Conditions were virtually perfect at Zambia's capital Lusaka, where the Sun dipped behind the moon just after 3:00pm local time. If you missed this eclipse, no problem. Just make sure you get to Australia in 2002, where the whole thing will happen again.

Planet hunters have been tremendously successful over the last few years, discovering more than 70 planets orbiting distant stars. New planet discoveries are coming in so quickly they're almost becoming routine, and hardly the front page headlines they commanded a few years ago. Planet hunters have upped the ante by detecting the atmospshere of a distant planet.

The planet in question is 70% the mass of Jupiter and orbits a star appproximately 150 light years away from Earth. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were able to sense the presence of sodium in the planet's atmosphere. Using this technique, planet hunters hope to push their instruments to the point that they'll be able to detect oxygen in a planet's atmosphere - a possible indication of life.

2001 wasn't a great year for the US space agency, as it was forced to deal with a series of challenges. Perhaps the biggest is the $4.8 billion in cost overruns incurred while building the International Space Station. Several future missions have been stripped back because of these overruns. The budget problems have had an impact in other areas as well, with the cancellation of the X-33 and X-34 programs (I guess we'll use the Space Shuttle for a few more decades).

As anticipated by many NASA watchers, Administrator Dan Goldin left NASA to have a normal life, and was replaced by Sean O'Keefe who will likely focus the bulk of his efforts on the tightening budgets.

There were a few more space events that shaped 2001, but didn't make my list. Still they deserve mentioning.

• The birth of my baby daughter - Chloe Cain. You knew I'd sneak this in somewhere. Here she is in burpy bliss.
• Using special software to remove atmosphere turbulence, the Paranal Observatory in South America now has the ability to resolve objects with the same power as the Hubble Space Telescope
• Several private aerospace firms were shut down including Beal Aerospace and the Rotary Rocket company.
• The plucky Mars Society spent another summer in the Canadian Arctic pretending to be on Mars and announced another desert testing base.
• NASA's Genesis spacecraft arrived at the Earth's L1 Lagrange point and prepared to to collect samples of the Sun's solar wind.
• Astronaut Marc Garneau was appointed to run my country's space agency (Canada). Go Marc!
• Mars got the closest it's ever been in 12 years but was obscured by a global dust storm. Oh well.

Image credits: NASA, Hubble, SpaceImaging, MirCorp, Olivier Staiger, me.