From monitoring Mercury to launching a new adventure to an icy moon of Jupiter, spacecraft and astronauts made great strides in 2024. Here are some of the highlights of this year in space.
New lunar visitors
The moon has been a hot destination for space agencies and private companies in recent years, and 2024 was no exception.
In January, the Japanese SLIM spacecraft made a successful but lopsided precision landing on a crater’s rim, marking the country’s first soft landing on the moon. The solar-powered Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon was designed to collect data for one lunar day, or about two weeks on Earth, before night fell
→ Continue reading at Science News