In 2024, nature treated New Englanders to a total solar eclipse within driving distance followed by several great displays of the aurora borealis, or northern lights. In space exploration, the year began with the demise of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter and ended with the Parker Solar Probe’s record breaking swing by the sun.
Around the world, scientists enthusiastically dug into new data from space probes to deepen our understanding of this world, the sun, and the rest of our solar system. Telescopes in space and on the ground revealed astonishing complexity in vast cosmic webs of matter and energy, as the James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful ever — pushed our views back to within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang.
