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A total of 77 orbital launches were attempted in 2012, with 72 being reported as successful, and a total of 139 payloads launched. [1] The three most prolific spacefaring nations were Russia, with 29 launches and 27 successes; China, with 19 launches, all of which succeeded; and the United States, with 13 launches, of which 12 succeeded and one was a partial failure. [1]
25 May 2012: SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft (pictured) becomes the first commercial spacecraft to rendezvous with the International Space Station. The year 2012 involved many significant scientific events and discoveries, including the first orbital rendezvous by a commercial spacecraft, the discovery of a particle highly similar to the long-sought Higgs boson, and the near-eradication of guinea ...
Bradbury Landing is the August 6, 2012, landing site within Gale crater on planet Mars of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover. On August 22, 2012, on what would have been his 92nd birthday, NASA named the site for author Ray Bradbury, who had died on June 5, 2012.
7 March 2012: scientists sequence the genome of the western gorilla. 1 March – New research concludes that the Earth's oceans may be growing more acidic at a faster rate than at any time in the past 300 million years. [155] [156] 2 March NASA's Cassini spacecraft detects oxygen in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Dione. [157]
The data collection phase of the mission lasted from 7 March 2012 to 29 May 2012, for a total of 88 days. A second phase, at a lower altitude, of data collection began 31 August 2012, [20] and was followed by 12 months of data analysis. [5] On 5 December 2012 NASA released a gravity map of the Moon made from GRAIL data. [21]
In May 2012, the Dawn team published preliminary results of their study of Vesta, including estimates of the size of Vesta's metal-rich core, which is theorized to be 220 km (140 mi) across. The scientists stated that they think that Vesta is the "last of its kind" – the only remaining example of the large planetoids that came together to ...
On 3 December 2012, NASA reported that Curiosity performed its first extensive soil analysis, revealing the presence of water molecules, sulfur and chlorine in the Martian soil. [74] [75] The presence of perchlorates in the sample seems highly likely. The presence of sulfate and sulfide is also likely because sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide ...
On 30 April 2013, NASA revealed that the telescope had narrowly avoided a collision a year earlier with a defunct Cold War-era Soviet spy satellite, Kosmos 1805, in April 2012. Orbital predictions several days earlier indicated that the two satellites were expected to occupy the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of each other.