2008 in science
overview of natural science-related events during the year of 2008
The year 2008 involved numerous significant scientific events and discoveries, some of which are listed below.
Astronomy
10 January - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope detects massive black holes in anomalously small galaxies.
15 January - NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft makes the first of its three flybys of Mercury at an altitude of 200 kilometres (120 mi), decreasing its velocity for its 2011 orbital insertion.
20 January – British space experts begin constructing an ion drive for a Mercury-bound spacecraft.
23 January – NASA's S-3 Viking aircraft returns to the agency's Glenn Research Center after extensive modifications to transform it from a carrier-based military aircraft to a state-of-the-art icing research aircraft.
7 February – An annular solar eclipse takes place.
5 March – Scientists solve a 40-year-old puzzle by identifying the origin of the intense radio waves in the Earth's upper atmosphere that control the dynamics of the Van Allen radiation belts.
12 March – The Cassini spacecraft performed a close flyby of Enceladus, coming within 50 kilometres (31 mi) of the moon's surface, its closest encounter yet with the sixth-largest moon of Saturn.
19 March – The gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B, the farthest object that could be seen by the naked eye, is observed.
8 June – NASA's Pluto probe New Horizons crosses the orbit of Saturn, after a journey of over two years.
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This entry incorporates text from “2008 in science” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.