Chris Hadfield
2015 has been a momentous year in space
Ayear ago – almost to the day – Philae, a spacecraft the size of a washing machine, landed on Rosetta, a comet 316 million miles from home. On arrival, it sent a simple tweet (“Touchdown! My new address: 67P! #CometLanding”), kickstarting an astonishing 12 months in the history of space exploration.
Just 24 hours ago, Nasa revealed the latest from its Mars mission: namely, that about four billion years ago, the Red Planet was stripped of its atmosphere by solar winds. From an unimaginably large supervoid (1.8 billion light-years in diameter) to salty water flowing down the slopes of Mars, the discoveries and pictures that have been sent back to Earth in the past 12 months have proved the age of exploration is entering a new and fruitful era.
That is certainly the view of Chris Hadfield, one of the world’s most famous living astronauts. The first Canadian commander of the International Space Station, the orbiting outpost that circles Earth once every 92 minutes, Hadfield gained millions of followers on social media by sending back a series of eye-catching photographs and tweets. And he made himself a household name around the world in 2013 when he performed a cover David Bowie’s Space Oddity while “floating in a tin can”.
“Definitely, in the last few months, and certainly in the last year, our restless intellect has driven us into the remotest regions,” he says from his home in Toronto, Canada. “It’s like it has rewritten the book on so many things. There has been this explosion of unexpected new information – which is the whole point of exploration, but it is delightful to see. It’s both really inspiring, but also extremely humbling to see how little we know.”
The Space Race of the Sixties, which landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, was fuelled by the Cold War between Russia and the United States, but Hadfield argues that – conversely – the current relatively peaceful period of history has been behind recent discoveries.
“It’s always a leapfrog. We finally get to a stable-enough moment in civilisation when everyone isn’t just scrabbling for survival [and] it allows the best and the brightest among us to really push back the edges of ignorance. When you get one of these momentary pauses, some of the great discoveries occur. And the world has never been more peaceful than now. If you look over the last 25 years, when you look at literacy rates, infant mortality, maternal mortality, the obliteration of certain diseases, it’s opening tremendous capability. It’s evidenced in medicine, in computer technology, but it’s also evidenced in exploration of the universe itself.”
Here, then, are some of 2015’s greatest achievements in space exploration, according to Hadfield.
The sheer size of the universe is, in many ways, the greatest discovery of the past year, says Hadfield. “Every shepherd for 10,000 years has looked up and wondered what’s going on, and ‘Are we alone?’, and everyone has constantly imagined UFOs, because we’ve wanted to think we’re not alone.
“But now, with our best telescopes, we are actually seeing planets around other stars. We are seeing thousands of them. So we are now starting to have a reasonable statistical extrapolation of the whole universe. Because we can see galaxies, and we can count stars in our own galaxies, so you can start to do the maths for the whole universe. And you can start to realise how many Earth-like planets are there. That’s an enormous discovery – a level of factbased insight that we’ve never been able to see before.”
This was also the year that planetary science discovered “the strongest evidence yet” that Mars is not such a dry, arid rock after all.
In September, new imaging techniques were used on data sent by a Mars rover to determine that streaks which appear on the planet’s slopes in the summer months were hydrated salts. The dark, narrow streaks, known as recurring slope lineae, appear on the walls of the Garni Crater during the warm summer months, then vanish when the temperatures drop, raising the prospect that Mars could support at least bacterial life.
For Hadfield, the discovery that water exists on Mars – in “thin layers of wet soil”, if not in pools of standing water – is a game-changer.
“We’ve known there’s been water on Mars for a long time,” he says. “What’s been revolutionary has been liquid water flowing down the surface. We’ve known intuitively – and evidentiary – that everywhere on Earth that there is liquid water, there is life. If you have heat and water, you have life. Just look under your sink…
“It’s not proof of life [on Mars] by any means. But it is an extremely tantalisingly familiar clue, and gives us one more reason, among many, to continue to explore Mars.”
Water was also determined this year on Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn. “We know this is a rock completely enveloped by a global ocean, which is then encrusted by a layer of ice,” says Hadfield. “But there is so much gravitational force that it is heating the water to the point that it is spews geysers off Enceladus into space, which is feeding the rings of Saturn. That is far-fetched science fiction, but that’s happening. And we are now going to drive the spaceship right through down into those plumes and measure what’s happening.”
Now retired, Hadfield says he is an optimist about the future. “Oddly enough, what really starts to soak into you is the age of the world, the immense, patient toughness of it. And how it has it has withstood such cataclysms in the past. It makes me extremely optimistic: we’re just a little pipsqueak, transient noisemaker running around on an incredibly ancient playing field.
“It’s not that we don’t need to be good stewards of the planet. But at the same time we need to not think we are the centre of the universe and that the entire purpose of the last 13.5 billion years was my particular four-score-and-ten on Earth.”
You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes by Chris Hadfield (Pan Macmillan, £14.99). To order a copy for £12.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk Chris Hadfield is a headline speaker at the Centaur Festival of Marketing at Tobacco Dock, London E1, on Nov 11-12 (festivalofmarketing.com)