The new year may expose new pop superstars, but those aren’t the only stars being watched. This year marks one of the busiest in space with events ranging from lunar eclipses to the planting of seeds on the moon, and not only space enthusiasts are excited.

Mission to Mars
The cosmos have always been a mystery, but scientists have slowly begun to unravel the secrets that are hidden in space.

One such mystery is the condition of other planets, especially the so-called red planet, Mars.

“The Curiosity rover is still wandering around [on Mars], so it will spend the year exploring the base of Mount Sharp,” Upper School Physics teacher Steve Heilig said. This exploration has an even more interesting purpose though: trying to determine geologically what happened on Mars. Mount Sharp is made up of “layer after layer of wind deposited sediment, so they [scientists] can sort of look at a chronological history of Mars, at least part of the history of Mars, by looking at those layers,” Heilig said.

New Horizons in sight
Some say that a mission called New Horizons will also be exploring a planet, but officially, it is not. This is because the mission will fly past the dwarf planet Pluto in July.

The mission’s goal is to learn more about Pluto by going close to, but not going into its orbit.

“We have never sent anything to Pluto before, so the best images we have are from the Hubble telescope that show a fuzzy ball with some patches of light or dark,” Heilig said.

Lunar Agriculture
“NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] is going to take some seeds to the moon and have a little container, have a little habitat, and see if they survive,” Heilig said regarding another project in 2015.

This may seem like a simple experiment, but since the Moon doesn’t rotate relative to the Earth, night and day are each 14 days long. “Depending on what they’ve got to let in light, you have to be careful for ultraviolet and x-rays and things like that,” Heilig said.

The new Gemini
Additionally, NASA plans to carry out a more personal mission in March involving how time spent in space can affect the human body. They plan to do this experiment by using twins to record differences in one that will spend a year on the International Space Station (ISS) compared to one staying on Earth.

Because the test subjects are humans, Heilig notes that this is the “closest experiment you can ethically get.”

Student space interest
With events happening all throughout the universe, St. Paul Academy and Summit School students were bound to get involved in studying space, a few capitalizing on this jam-packed year by taking Heilig’s Space Science class.

“We try to have a Star Party once a week which is we just go out at night with some telescopes and study different things in the sky,” senior Mike Destache said about how the class gets involved.

“There is quite a lot of talking about recent events and breakthroughs that pertain to space,” Destache said about Heilig’s class.

“The thing that fascinates me about space is the physics behind it and learning about things that just don’t really make sense and that are different which is pretty much everything in space,” he said. Even if not everything makes sense, the information and knowledge gained from the class is invaluable. “The class is not like any other class at the school,” Destache said.

The student body looks up
Even SPA students that cannot take the class can get involved with space this year by observing several events right here in Minnesota. “We have two lunar eclipses this year, one in April, one in September,” Heilig said. “[An event to view the eclipses] is what I hope and plan to do,” he said.

Because there are so many missions, projects, and events going on in 2015, it’s easy for the curious student to get active in studying space science. “It’s cool to look up and know that there’s stuff up there, whether it be our technology or far away planets, or anything” freshman Olivia Williams-Ridge said.