2002 in science

The year 2002 in science and technology involved many events, some of which are included below.

Astronomy and space exploration

February 19 - NASA's Mars Odyssey space probe begins to map the surface of Mars using its thermal emission imaging system.
May 26 - The Mars Odyssey finds signs of huge water ice deposits on the planet Mars.
June 4 - Quaoar is discovered
June 10 - Annular solar eclipse
December 4 - Total solar eclipse

January 17 - Eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, displacing an estimated 400,000 people.

December 19 - Clozapine is the first drug approved by the FDA for reducing the risk of suicidal behaviour.

Claims regarding bubble fusion, in which a table-top apparatus is reported as producing small-scale fusion in a liquid undergoing acoustic cavitation are published.

November 4, A Tactical high energy laser prototype shot down an incoming artillery shell.

John B. Fenn (Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA) and Koichi Tanaka (Shimadzu Corp., Kyoto, Japan) "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules"
Kurt Wthrich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zrich, Switzerland and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA) "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution"

Raymond Davis Jr. (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA) and Masatoshi Koshiba (International Center for Elementary Particle Physics, University of Tokyo, Japan) "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos"
Riccardo Giacconi (Associated Universities Inc., Washington DC, USA) "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources"

Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston "for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death"

Science

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