Any year in which we discover the potential for organisms to live elsewhere in the universe is a good year for science and research, and in 2010, NASA scientists did just that. In an experiment performed with microbes gathered at California's prehistoric Mono Lake, a team led by astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon was able to grow organisms in the lab substituting arsenic for phosphorus, which was previously thought to be one of the six elements at the root of all life here on earth.
Of course, NASA had an up-and-down year in other ways. On the one hand, the space agency's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) returned its first deep-space images (of the constellation Carina), a development that promises to open up the skies to new and larger surveys, and a NASA rover discovered sub-surface water on Mars. But on the other, the Obama administration decided that the long-running and expensive Constellation program, which would have taken us back to the moon, was a waste of time and resources. The program was canceled.
The primary beneficiary of that cancellation is likely to be the private space industry. And in 2010, one of the leaders in that field, SpaceX, was able to launch its Falcon 9 rocket into space in a demonstration of its ability to carry payloads to the International Space Station. And then Boeing and Space Adventures announced their partnership in an initiative aimed at building a new space tourism industry that could be within the reach of a wide new audience of celestial adventurers.
Research on and below the surface of our own seas was definitely a highlight of the year, even as the Gulf of Mexico took it on the chin in the form of the BP oil spill. First, scientists celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first (and only) manned mission to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on the planet. Then, engineers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute deployed a new class of autonomous underwater vehicle that's a hybrid of existing AUVs, a new long-range underwater robot capable of moving four times as fast as traditional gliders, and that can spend weeks hovering in place, using power it generates from the ocean itself to bring along a significant number of scientific instruments.
There was also the successful maiden voyage of the Plastiki, banking heir David de Rothschild's catamaran made entirely from plastic bottles, which sailed from Sausalito, Calif., to Australia, all in the hope of raising awareness about how humans treat the oceans.
2010 was definitely a good year for robotics; everywhere you turned, there were new developments. Perhaps the biggest of the year was the introduction of the Personal Robot 2 (PR2) by Willow Garage, a company that decided to give two-year loans of their $400,000 programmable, all-purpose, open-source robots to 11 organizations from around the world that agreed to work on unique and innovative projects. Willow Garage and companies like Anybots also got more attention for what are known as telepresence robots, devices that can help people and companies avoid long-distance travel.
