Great Accomplishments in 2012

Before we get too far into 2012, I wanted to highlight some of the great space-related achievements from last year.  While there were many noteworthy events, a few come to mind as setting the stage for years to come.  Here are four that I have selected.

-- SpaceX:  The company's successful resupply mission to the International Space Station has created a new relationship between the U.S. space program and the private sector.  Today private companies are in a position to replace NASA for routine missions.  The question now is whether they someday supplant NASA.

-- Higgs Bosom:  The discovery of this mysterious particle explaining most of the universe will keep scientists busy for years.  Brian Cox, the English professor and particle physicist, stated in The Guardian:

The hubristic nature of daring to imagine it, of daring to say: "This is how I think the universe works", is truly brilliant. It's difficult for anyone to get their head around – it's only a century ago that Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus. We didn't even know that atoms existed 150 years ago. This will speed up our understanding of the universe rapidly.

-- Voyager Exiting the Solar System:  The two Voyager spacecraft are crossing the border between home and the unknown as they exited our solar system and began a new journey.  They are still part of the protecting heliosphere of our system, but not for much longer. What is amazing beyond this feat is that we can still communicate with both spacecraft 35 years after their launch. According to NASA, the signal from Voyager 1 takes approximately 17 hours to travel to Earth. The durability of these craft and ingenuity of our space program is pretty amazing. 

-- Curiosity on Mars:  The successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars was a solid accomplishment for NASA and mankind.  With its cluster of sophisticated instruments, we have a chance to learn much more about the Red Planet and its origins.  With the success of Curiosity, NASA is planning a second rover.  Nothing breeds optimism (and duplication) like success. 

Update:  Scientific American released its own list of Top 10 Science Stories of 2012.  We certainly agree on many topics.

"I think we have it"

With that statement, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, announced the existence of the elusive Higgs-like particle.

So what does it all mean?  Here is how CERN describes the situation in its July 4 press release: 

The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.

So, in other words we have now found about 96 percent of the universe.  I guess that helps to fill the gap in our knowledge.  London's The Guardian put it high on the list of scientific achievements: 

The discovery of the Higgs particle ranks as one of the most important scientific advances of the past 100 years. It proves there is an invisible energy field that pervades the vacuum of the known universe. This field is thought to give mass to the smallest building blocks of matter, the quarks and electrons that make up atoms. Without the field, or something like it, there would be no planets, stars, or life as we know it.

The BBC covers the topic well in this documentary.  The story adds some useful context to the topic.

Update:  Slate magazine has a good analogy for explaining Higgs bosom:

Imagine a room full of physicists. Suddenly Einstein enters and attempts to cross the room, but the star-struck physicists cluster around him and impede his movements, effectively increasing his mass. Now imagine that I enter the room. As a lowly grad student, nobody wants to interact with me, so I pass through the physicists relatively unimpeded—no effective mass for me! Lastly, imagine that somebody whispers a rumor, causing the physicists to cluster together excitedly on their own.

In this analogy, the room full of physicists represents the Higgs field in space, Einstein represents a particle with high mass, I represent a particle with low mass (or no mass), and a cluster of physicists represents an excitation of the field, which is effectively a Higgs boson.