The year 2002 in science and technology involved some significant events

Astronomy and space science

• February 19 – NASA's 2001 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 6 – 2002 Eastern Mediterranean event: An object with an estimated diameter of 10 meters impacts with Earth's atmosphere over the Mediterranean and detonates in mid-air. ^[1]
• June 10 – Solar eclipse of June 10, 2002: Annular solar eclipse.
• September 25 – 2002 Vitim event: Possible bolide impact in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. ^[2]
• December 4 – Solar eclipse of December 4, 2002: Total solar eclipse.

Biology

• 18 April – New suborder of insects, Mantophasmatidae, announced.
• Publication of Systema Porifera: a guide to the classification of sponges edited by John N. A. Hooper and Rob W. M. Van Soest. ^{[3] [4] [5] [6]}

Cartography

• Hobo–Dyer projection commissioned.

Computer science and cybernetics

• January 7 – The iMac G4 is introduced by Apple, Inc., as the next generation iMac.
• March 14 – Prof. Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading in England has part of his nervous system experimentally linked to a computer. ^[7] On June 10, he demonstrates the first direct electronic communication between the nervous systems of two humans.
• September 20 – Release of the Tor anonymity network is announced. ^[8]
• September 23 – The first version of the web browser Firefox is released by the Mozilla Organization.
• October 1 – The Danger Hiptop is released, the first smartphone to incorporate instant messaging.

Earth sciences

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

Mathematics

• August 6 – Polynomial-time primality test published.
• November 12 – Grigori Perelman posts the first of a series of eprints to the arXiv in which he proves the century-old Poincaré conjecture.

Palaeoarchaeology

• Ciampate del Diavolo (early hominid footprints in Italy) come to scientific attention.

Philosophy

Physics

• March 8 – 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. ^[9]
• May – Experimental discovery of a new type of radioactivity: the 2-protons radioactivity. ^{[10] [11]}

Physiology and medicine

• February – Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in the eye identified by Samer Hattar and colleagues. ^{[12] [13]}
• May 14 – Red wine is claimed by Spanish researchers to protect against the common cold. ^[14]
• June – The gene BRAF is shown to be faulty ( mutated) in some human cancers. ^[15]
• November – Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic begins in Guangdong province of China. ^[16]
• December 19 – Clozapine is the first drug approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for reducing the risk of suicidal behaviour.

Technology

• November 4 – A Tactical High Energy Laser prototype shoots down an incoming artillery shell.
• Malcolm C. Smith introduces the inerter in the study of the mechanical network in control theory. ^[17]

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Laurent Lafforgue and Vladimir Voevodsky
• Nobel Prizes
  • Chemistry
    • 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 Wüthrich ( Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, 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"
  • Physics
    • 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, D.C., USA) "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources"
  • Medicine
    • Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston "for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death"
• Turing Award: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Rudolf Trumpy

Deaths

• January 8 – Alexander Prokhorov (b. 1916), physicist.
• February 6 – Max Perutz (b. 1914), biologist.
• February 10 – Harold Furth (b. 1930), expert in plasma physics and nuclear fusion.
• February 24 – David Hawkins (b. 1913), philosopher of science and mathematics and science educator.
• February 26 – Helen Megaw (b. 1907), crystallographer.
• March 3 – Roy Porter (b. 1946), medical historian.
• April 9 – Leopold Vietoris (b. 1891), mathematician.
• April 18 – Thor Heyerdahl (b. 1914), explorer, led the Kon-Tiki expedition.
• May 2 – W. T. Tutte (b. 1917), mathematician and cryptanalyst.
• May 20 – Stephen Jay Gould (b. 1941), paleontologist/ evolutionist.
• June 20 – Erwin Chargaff (b. 1905), biochemist.
• June 29 – Ole-Johan Dahl (b. 1931), computer scientist, invented concepts in object-oriented programming.
• June 30 – W. Maxwell Cowan (b. 1931), neuroanatomist.
• July 4 – Laurent Schwartz (b. 1915), mathematician.
• August 6 – Edsger Dijkstra (b. 1930), computer scientist.
• August 31 – George Porter (b. 1920), Nobel laureate in chemistry.
• September 6 – Orvan Hess (b. 1906), obstetrician.
• September 21 – Robert Lull Forward (b. 1932), science fiction author and physicist.
• September 29 – Giuliana Tesoro (b. 1921), Italian-American organic chemist
• October 18 – Nikolai Rukavishnikov (b. 1932), cosmonaut.
• November 2 – Charles Sheffield (b. 1935), science fiction author and physicist.
• November 11 – Esther Somerfeld-Ziskind (b. 1901), neurologist and psychiatrist.

References