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The following is an extract from our monthly Launchpad newsletter, in which resident space expert Leah Crane journeys through the solar system and beyond. You can sign up for Launchpad for freeÌýhere.

As the end of the year looms, I wanted to take a look back at the most important, fun and fascinating space stories from 2023. There were amazing images that blew me away, audacious space missions and even a few new mysteries about the early galaxy, gamma ray bursts and extra matter where there shouldn’t be any.

The incredible pictures

The James Webb Space Telescope started sending back pictures in 2023, but it really hit its stride this year with a slew of images that we can expect to continue in future years. Here are three of my favourites:

This is the Ring Nebula, which is about 2600 light years away in the direction of the constellation Lyra. We only get to see it in this kind of detail by chance – it just happens to be lined up perfectly face-on, so we can look through its strange doughnut hole and see the greenish tinge caused by the nebula’s central star illuminating a cloud of oxygen. Nebulae like this are extraordinarily complex beasts, and our sun will most likely end up as one in the distant future, so studying the Ring Nebula could help us understand our solar system’s future.

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Saturn is clearly the most photogenic of the solar system’s planets, but this is a type of view we’ve never had before. It was taken in near-infrared wavelengths, hiding some of the details of Saturn’s swirling atmosphere but revealing other faint structures that wouldn’t be visible in other wavelengths. On the left, you can see the moons Dione, Tethys and Enceladus, and future pictures like this might help researchers find even more tiny moons.

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This picture has been in the newsletter before, but I’m repeating it because it may be my very favourite space picture of the year. It shows an object called Herbig-Haro 211 (HH 211), which is located about 1000 light years away from Earth in the constellation Perseus. The star itself isn’t visible in this image – it is shrouded in clouds of gas – but the jets spewing from either side of it come through bright and clear. The extraordinary detail of this image makes it perhaps the best picture of a Herbig-Haro object ever taken.

The astonishing missions

There was a huge assortment of missions launched over the past year, and I won’t be able to get to all of them, but I want to mention some of the major ones. The first big launch was in April, when the European Space Agency (ESA) sent its JUICE craft off towards Jupiter. It won’t arrive there until 2031, when it will fly past Jupiter’s moons Europa and Callisto before entering orbit around the moon Ganymede. The main goal is to examine the surfaces of these small worlds and search them for signs of hidden underground oceans that could potentially host life.

April also saw the first test launch of SpaceX’s Starship craft, which blew up – that happened again in November, although the second test did technically make it to space first. SpaceX has called both tests at least partial successes, although it’ll have to wait for governmental review before it can do any more Starship launches. Continued testing is crucial if Starship is going to shuttle astronauts and cargo to the moon in the coming years as planned.

Speaking of the moon, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission landed there in August. It was the first craft ever to land near the moon’s south pole. The lander and rover operated for one lunar day, which is about two weeks on Earth, before the bitter cold of lunar night killed them. The data it gathered on the moon hasn’t been analysed and released yet, but the goal of the mission was to hunt for water near the south pole, which could prove crucial for planned crewed missions and even permanent moon bases in the coming decades.

The last major launch of the year was NASA’s Psyche mission, which launched in October to visit an asteroid of the same name. We know very little about the asteroid Psyche aside from the fact that it’s mostly made of metal, not rock like many other asteroids. The metal composition means that it could be more like the core of a rocky planet than a regular asteroid, so this may present our best chance to observe a planet’s centre up close. The mission is expected to arrive at Psyche in 2029.

The mysteries found

While those missions are off to unravel some of the mysteries of the universe, new ones are popping up all the time. The biggest one this year, in my opinion, is what is going on with the early universe. JWST has made a number of discoveries that suggest things developed much faster than we would expect back then – from weirdly huge and well-developed galaxies to black holes that are much more massive than they ought to be to stars that are so enormous they might be powered by dark matter. We don’t have totally convincing solutions for why or how any of these objects exist yet, and it’ll surely be a topic of research for years or even decades to come.

There are also smaller mysteries spotted nearly every day. Those include the most powerful space explosion ever spotted, a gamma ray burst called GRB221009A, that is continually breaking all of astronomers’ models of these events. Closer to home, there’s also a ring of dust sharing Mercury’s orbit that really shouldn’t exist, although two missions are on their way to Mercury and may help researchers figure out how it came to be. There also seems to be a bunch of extra matter hanging around large galaxies, and we have no clue where that could have come from. Honestly, I find new mysteries more exciting than mysteries solved – although there were plenty of those this year, too – because they promise more surprises to come.