In November, NASA announced a rocket experiment found that the universe is brighter than scientists originally thought. NASA's Kepler mission announced in February the discovery of 715 new planets outside our solar system. These newly-verified worlds, known as exoplanets, orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system. Two months later, astronomers using Kepler announced they had discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet.
The artist's concept depicts Kepler-186f , the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone.
Image Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech
One of the biggest mysteries in astronomy, how stars blow up in supernova explosions, finally started to be unraveled in February with the help of NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). The high-energy X-ray observatory has created the first map of radioactive material in a supernova remnant. The results, from a remnant named Cassiopeia A (Cas A), reveal how shock waves likely rip massive dying stars apart.
NASA’s Van Allen Probes mission, which is studying the mysteries of Earth’s radiation belts, celebrated its two-year anniversary on Aug. 30. The twin probes, shortly after launch in 2012, discovered a third radiation belt around Earth when only two had previously been detected.
In October, NASA announced its Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft provided scientists with five new findings into how the sun’s atmosphere, or corona, is heated far hotter than its surface, what causes the sun’s constant outflow of particles called the solar wind, and what mechanisms accelerate particles that power solar flares.
Scientists using NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) announced in February that data from the spacecraft has shown a magnetic field that is nearly perpendicular to the motion of our solar system through the galaxy. In addition to shedding light on our cosmic neighborhood, the results offer an explanation for a decades-old mystery on why we measure more incoming high-energy cosmic rays on one side of the sun than on the other.
On Dec. 6, after a voyage of nearly nine years and three billion miles -- the farthest any space mission has ever traveled to reach its primary target -- NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft came out of hibernation for its long-awaited 2015 encounter with the Pluto system.
The construction and testing of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was fully underway in 2014. In October, the Integrated Science Instrument Module, or the “heart” that holds the telescope’s instruments, successfully completed a nearly four-month test in a cryogenic thermal vacuum chamber. The test simulated the icy, -387 degrees Fahrenheit conditions the telescope will operate under in space. Webb is considered to be the scientific successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and is on track for a 2018 launch.
The Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) of the James Webb Space Telescope emerges from the thermal vacuum chamber at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Image Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
