The world has experienced enormous challenges in 2021, and unfortunately, this wave of the epidemic is still seriously affecting the lives of most of us today. However, the past 2021 is not only a disaster and a sad year, in the face of disaster, our attention has quietly shifted from the boring news reports we are familiar with in recent years to the successes and great deeds of this year. This year due to the epidemic, although our lives have become more difficult, our thirst for extraterrestrial knowledge remains.
Many of you may think that 2021 is a year that will be forgotten sooner or later, but before that, let's relive the highlights of the year when we humans are on the road to achieving our "star chasing", the most important discoveries and breakthroughs in the exploration of the universe. 2021 was the busiest year for our red neighbor, Mars, completing three landmark Mars exploration missions. The first was the United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter, which will observe how mars will change over the next few days, months or even years and draw the first global map of the Martian atmosphere.
Then we saw that Tianwen-1 also fulfilled its mission to complete the Mars exploration, and the Zhurong rover it carried successfully landed on Mars, which is a great task, because no country has tried to land rovers and orbiters on the surface of the planet in the first process of exploring Mars. But China has done it, and it is a historic moment in the process of space exploration. The biggest story about Mars this year came from NASA, which successfully landed the Perseverance rover to the site of a thirsty lake and river delta called JEZERO. The rover is mainly used to study rocks and sediments in order to explore and discover ancient microorganisms.
Perseverance has accomplished many missions within the short time it has stayed on Mars, such as successfully converting carbon dioxide into oxygen using a device called MOXIE, collecting rock samples from Martian dust for the first time, and releasing a delicate device, an ultralight helicopter that has flown more than a dozen times in martian's thin atmosphere, marking the first time ever that humans have used a vehicle to fly on an alien planet.
In 2021, we will not only explore Mars, BUT NASA's Parker probe has also explored the sun as the first-ever vehicle to explore the sun. The extremely hot probe, which travels within the sun's hot atmosphere and collects data in an extremely hot environment, has so far shuttled through the corona three times while using a special device to collect particles from the sun's atmosphere, achievements that some scientists say are comparable to human landings on the moon.
Incredibly, as it slammed through the sun, we could see a view of the Parker Solar Probe that was time-lapse. This image, made up of individual photographs captured during the detection of the closest contact with the Sun, shows us zoom stripes with electrical and plasma, known as "coronal streams." In the background of the photo, if you look closely, you can see the cloud belt of the Milky Way as well as Mars, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Jupiter. But the work on the Parker Solar Probe isn't done yet, as it still needs to collect four years of data.
We can expect to see more spectacular images of our galaxy in the future. Throughout 2021, more than 500 exoplanets were discovered, bringing more than 4884 confirmed planets to our solar system. For example, GJ367b. This distant planet, which may be essentially a 3/4 Earth-sized planet, is half a molten iron ball of light. The newly discovered alien planet orbits a small, dim red dwarf star in a very small orbit with an orbital period of 7.7 hours. This means that the time spent on this planet is only 7.7 hours. Another strange exoplanet was discovered in 2021 and named 2M0437B, making it one of the youngest planets to be discovered to date.
This surprising image reveals the young planet, which is only a few million years old, still flashing in the reflected light of its parent star. Astronomers may also have also discovered an extragalactic planet, making it the first planet ever to be observed extragalactically. The extragalactic exoplanet named M51-ULS-1b, a magnificent spiral galaxy located 28 million light-years away, is also known as Messier 51 (M51). If confirmed, the discovery could open up a whole new path of exploration and discover more exoplanets beyond the Milky Way. But that's not all the downside, with the discovery of uninhabitable exoplanets in 2021 as astronomers certifying a new class of planets called Hearst planets.
These new planets are habitable, but instead of having a lot of rocks like Earth, they are covered in oceans and abundant hydrogen. The researchers picked a particular exoplanet, which was named K2-18b. It is the most promising habitat planet ever discovered, and it will be observed with the newly invented James Webb Space Telescope. When after decades of work and millions of dollars spent, the world witnessed the successful invention of the James Webb Space Telescope, which made me feel as happy as Christmas.
The most complex looking glasses ever sent into space. A hundred times more sensitive than Hubble, Webb can detect infrared light from galaxies that formed after the Big Bang 13.5 billion years ago. It will look deeper into the universe than ever before, revealing the birth of the first galaxies, stars and exoplanets, and may even help in the search for life beyond Earth. The Webb telescope will be able to observe these ancient cosmic structures because it has a giant golden mirror. When Webb travels through space, it can intercept red and infrared light. The huge tennis court-sized visor was designed to keep the Webb telescope at extremely low temperatures, blocking the sun's rays and allowing the telescope to observe very weak signals from distant objects.
Although the Webb telescope was successfully launched into space, there is still a dangerous journey ahead. Next month, it will travel nearly 1 million miles, or 1.5 million kilometers, and as it approaches its final location, the proverbially known second Lagrange point (L2), it will slowly unfold and reshape. In about half a year, the James Webb Space Telescope will begin routine scientific observations and begin sending data to Earth, including beautiful images of the universe that have never been seen before. 2021 also saw many other space discoveries and breakthroughs, such as a giant leap forward in space tourism, with Virgin Atlantic, Blue Origin and SpaceX all making their first tourist-focused missions.
We even saw William Shatner boldly go to places other 90-year-olds never went. Scientists have revealed for the first time the existence of a magnetic field around the black hole, and we're also seeing the launch of a new mission designed to test techniques to prevent asteroids from colliding with Earth, just a small part of it. When it comes to space exploration, 2021 has once again not disappointed, and I can't wait to see what we'll find in 2022.
Related knowledge
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope developed by NASA with contributions from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The telescope is named after James E. Webb,[8] who served as director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from 1961 to 1968 and played an integral role in the Apollo program. [9] [10] It is intended to replace the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA's flagship mission in astrophysics. JWST was launched on December 25, 2021 on Ariane Flight VA256.
It is designed to provide higher infrared resolution and sensitivity than Hubble, to observe objects that are 100 times weaker than What Hubble can observe, and to enable extensive research in astronomy and cosmology, including observations of some of the oldest, most distant, cosmic events and objects in the redshift Z≈20[13], such as the formation of the first stars and the first galaxies, and detailed atmospheric features of potentially habitable exoplanets.
By: Covenant with oneself, cling, the deceased like a river, heavy songs