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Year: 2018

Virgin Galactic just brought human spaceflight back to American soil after a seven-year hiatus, and other private companies are poised to make some giant leaps of their own.

Virgin’s VSS Unity suborbital spaceliner soared to a maximum altitude of 51.4 miles (82.7 kilometers) during a rocket-powered test flight over California’s Mojave Desert yesterday (Dec. 13).

The milestone marked the first U.S.-based crewed trip to the final frontier since NASA grounded its space shuttle fleet in July 2011. And it was the first spaceflight ever by a private vehicle designed to carry commercial passengers. (By one measure, anyway: Though many people place the boundary of outer space 62 miles, or 100 km, up at the “Karman Line,” the U.S. Air Force awards astronaut wings to personnel who reach an altitude of 50 miles, or 80 km.) [In Photos: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity Soars to Space].

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Florida residents, you have a new neighbor — and it has the body of an eel and the spots of a leopard. It also has two small arms with gills sticking out of its body, and lives in the swamps of the Panhandle.

The creature is actually a new species of legless salamander or siren. It is being officially called Siren reticulata, or the Reticulated Siren, and its discovery was published in the journal PLOS One journal last week.

Scientists say the two-foot-long Reticulated Siren is among the largest species discovered in the United States in over 100 years.

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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may not have managed to spot InSight under its parachute, but it has finally spotted the lander, its parachute, and its heat shield resting on the Martian surface. The images confirm the location of InSight’s landing site, a little to the north and west of the center of the landing ellipse.

First, the fantastic hardware images:

HiRISE images of InSight hardware on Mars

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A startup based in Maryland has released and tested an impressive new quantum computer that demonstrates the power of an occasionally overlooked quantum computing architecture.

Companies like IBM, Google, and Rigetti are developing new kinds of computer processors that rely on the mathematics of subatomic particles to potentially perform calculations difficult for classical computers to do. These devices use superconductors as the basis for their qubits. A company called IonQ, however, has now announced a state-of-the-art system that relies on the quantum nature of atoms themselves, and it’s one of the best-performing quantum computers yet.

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There will be no New Year’s Eve revelry for those working on NASA’s New Horizon’s space probe. They will need to be stone cold sober with their wits about them when, on New Year’s Day 2019, it whizzes past one of the fossil building blocks of the planets and one of the most primitive bodies in the Solar System.

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