Top Stories 2015

No. 1 New Horizons at Pluto

The long-awaited fly-by of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft, on 14 July 2015, was an event 85 years in the making, following Pluto’s discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Since then, Pluto has gone from planet to dwarf planet, but despite protestations from the New Horizons team, its reclassification never really changed the mission or the importance of what it would find at Pluto.

Top Stories 2015

No. 2 Water on Mars

Liquid water existing on the surface of Mars, in the here and now, has been the holy grail of Martian exploration for some time, but in October 2015 NASA announced that the orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) had turned water-diviner to find compelling evidence that water is bursting out onto the red surface and trickling down the slopes of crater walls and hillsides.

Top Stories 2015

No. 3 Dark matter is ‘sticky’

For years, dark matter seemed to do nothing. It had mass and therefore could influence space gravitationally, but there was no evidence of it interacting with anything else in the Universe in any other way, which made it incredibly frustrating to study. Then, in 2015, a breakthrough occurred.

Top Stories 2015

No. 7 Is that you, Beagle 2?

At a packed press conference at London’s Royal Society back in January 2015, British scientists revealed what we had waited nearly a dozen years for: that the Beagle 2 space probe, lost back in December 2003 when it attempted to land on Mars, had been found.