Time flies when you’re having fun! The year 2018 saw us shooting across the universe to gaze at galaxy clusters, light-bending black holes, and gorgeous young stars. While it’s close to impossible to pick favorites, we’re giving it a shot: For this final 2018 installment of Space Photos of the Week, we’ve gathered some of the year’s highlights, including the first spacecraft landing on Mars in six years.
A couple of in memoriams for the year: the dusk of the Dawn mission around Ceres and the finale of the Kepler exoplanet hunter. The latter confirmed the existence of more than 2,000 planets orbiting other stars. Just a few months before Kepler disconnected, though, its successor, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), launched and began collecting data. NASA also kicked off a new mission to Mars called InSight that landed safely on November 26 on the flat Elysium Planitia plain, where it will spend two years doing research on what’s below the planetary surface. Then things become a bit weird as we visit some luminous galaxies, including one that is actively eating its neighbors and another that looks like a penguin guarding a bright green cosmic egg.
These deep-space photos should set you up for more in 2019. So take a moment to reminisce with WIRED and its weekly trips into space. For the full year’s photos and beyond, explore our full collection here.
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Source:WIRED
