Top Space Stories of 2018.

Year 2018 was a productive and successful year for Spaceflight and Space Exploration and here are some achievement which open door for human civilization on mars.

Here are some of Top Space Stories of 2018 and spaceflight activities.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Launch

 The Falcon Heavy launched on Feb. 6, 2018 and quickly unveiled a treat to those watching the livestream: the primary payload was a dummy called "Starman," riding in a Tesla X roadster (an homage to one of SpaceX founder Elon Musk's other companies). 

 The upper stage of the rocket fired the car and passenger out into deep space, toward the orbit of Mars. To say the launch went viral doesn't begin to describe the magnitude of social-media excitement that day.

NASA's InSight Mars Landing

 InSight, the first American spacecraft to land on the red planet since the Curiosity rover in 2012, touched down safely on Nov. 26, an event that attracted viewers around the country.

 A seismic wave detector will listen for underground “marsquakes,” or seismic waves, and take the “pulse” of Mars. While Mars doesn’t seem to have plate tectonics, seismic waves could be measured from cracking and cooling, meteorite impacts or underground magma.

Parker Solar Probe launches 'touch' the sun

 The Parker Solar Probe lifted off successfully on Aug. 12 on a journey that will see it dip multiple times into the sun's outer atmosphere, giving unprecedented insights into the sun's composition and inner mechanics. 
 One of our star's key mysteries is why the corona is so darn hot. Temperatures there range between 1.8 million and 5.4 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million and 3 million degrees Celsius). Compare that with the surface of the sun, a far cooler 10,000 degrees F (5,500 degrees C). Scientists suspect that the sun's convection and magnetic fields contribute to the corona's high temperature, but they need observations to back up the theory.

TESS launches in search of exoplanets 

 TESS is designed to look for planets near stars in our own neighborhood. Finding planets close to Earth provides a few advantages, such as allowing other telescopes to quickly zero in on these worlds to learn more about their atmospheric composition. 

 TESS will also act as a pathfinder observatory for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is set to launch in 2021 on a science mission that will partly include exoplanet studies.

Chinese lander launch for moon's dark side

 The Chang'e 4 spacecraft flew from our planet on Dec. 7 on a quest to land a rover and a stationary lander in early January. Its expected destination is the Von Kármán Crater, which is 115 miles (186 km) wide. The crater is a part of the larger South Pole-Aitken Basin complex, which spans an incredible 1,600 miles (2,500 km).
 The moon's far side is not visible from Earth and, in fact, was not even imaged until the first Soviet satellites orbited the moon in the 1960s.

Japan's Hayabusa2 arrives at Ryugu

 After a more than three-year journey through space, the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft arrived at asteroid Ryugu on June 27 and quickly got to work.
 The aim of Hayabusa2 is to return a sample of the asteroid back to Earth, just as the original Hayabusa spacecraft did nearly a decade ago. But first, Hayabusa2 dropped onto Ryugu two rovers and a lander, which sent back pictures of a bizarre surface.

Voyager2 reaches interstellar space

 One of NASA's most famous spacecraft reached a cosmic milestone around Nov. 5, when Voyager 2 passed the boundary into interstellar space — the place where the influence of the sun gives way to that of other stars.

 It's not NASA's first spacecraft to do so; the probe's twin, Voyager 1, made it to interstellar space in 2012. So, Voyager 2 now provides another data point about how the transition zone between the heliopause (the sun's neighborhood) and interstellar space works.