2021 Review and Mars Update

Hello and welcome to the 2021 How Far Away Is It review. Last year we covered the workings of the James Webb Space Telescope with the idea that this year’s review would include pictures from Webb. Continuing delays pushed the launch out to Christmas Day. So far, telescope deployment and the journey to L2 are on schedule. But mirror calibration will take months. So, we won’t be seeing images from Webb until our 2022 update. I’ll have more on this in our first segment of this review.

After that we’ll see an asteroid that looks like a comet. We’ll take a closer look at Jupiter’s great storm. Previously, we covered how the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft landed on the asteroid Bennu. In 2021 it stared its journey back to Earth carrying Bennu rocks.  We’ll cover new stars forming in Orion and news on the supergiant VY Canis Majoris’ diming.

Moving out of the Milky Way, we’ll see a couple of supernovae. We’ll examine a diffuse galaxy without any Dark Matter. We’ll see a couple of interacting galaxies, and a galaxy with a 36,000 light-years long shadow. We’ll cover a gamma ray burst that may have been connect to the creation of a magnetar. I have a beautiful image of the gravitationally lensed Molten Ring Galaxy. We’ll see multiple images of a supernova along with the prediction that one more image will show up in 2037. We’ll take a look at a couple of double quasars. We’ll finish with Hamelton’s Object – 11 bly away. For the last segment we’ll do a deeper dive into three missions to Mars: One from the United Arab Emirates; one from China; and one from the US. We’ll start with a brief update on Webb. I trust you’ll find it all interesting and informative. Thanks for watching.