It’s been an extraordinary year for NASA and its international partners.
To celebrate, the U.S. space agency has released a video featuring some of the highlights from the last 12 months, together with a rousing speech delivered by NASA chief Bill Nelson at an event at Rice University in Houston, Texas, earlier this year.
According to the two-minute video, memorable moments from 2022 include the powerful James Webb Space Telescope beaming back its first extraordinary images from a point a million miles from Earth, and the successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) that deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, paving the way for an Earth defense system capable of saving humankind from potentially cataclysmic asteroid strikes.
Meanwhile, the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter continued their activities on Mars, tens of millions of miles from Earth, while astronauts carried on living and working aboard the International Space Station around 250 miles above our planet.
More recently, NASA finally got to launch the most powerful rocket ever to fly. The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket will play a major role in a new era of human space exploration that began with its test launch in November as part of the Artemis I mission. The SLS propelled an uncrewed Orion spacecraft toward the moon where it came within just 80 miles of the lunar surface before returning to Earth on December 11. The successful voyage sets NASA up for a crewed mission taking the same path in a couple of years from now, and an astronaut lunar landing soon after that.
“Throughout America’s story, there are defining days,” Nelson says in the video. “Days when minds change, hearts fill, and imaginations soar. Days when visions transform the trajectory of the American story, which is our story.”
The NASA boss continues: “Doing what is hard and achieving what is great, that’s what stirs humankind. That’s what unites us. With inspiration and innovation, no hard Herculean effort is too large. No moonshot is beyond our reach.
“A new generation — the Artemis generation — stands ready. Ready to return humanity to the moon and then to take us further than ever before, to Mars.
“Let us continue the quest to unfold this universe and let us continue to find unity in our discovery, so together let us continue to dream beyond the impossible dream that now becomes real, then let us traverse the untouched terrain of the once unreachable stars.”
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