2000s in Science and Technology - Science

Science

• Astrophysicists studying the universe confirmed its age at 13.7 billion years, discovered that it will most likely expand forever without limit, and concluded that only 4% of the universe's contents are ordinary matter (the other 96% being still-mysterious dark matter, dark energy, and dark flow).
• The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Mission successfully reached the surface of Mars in 2004, and sent detailed data and images of the landscape there back to Earth. Whilst NASA's original mission timeline of 3 months was incorrectly speculated, the mission was tremendously successful overall in the long term, as the MER Mission continues until this day, lasting nearly 25x the projected length.
• The Human Genome Project was completed. (1999)
• National Geographic and IBM funded The Genographic Project which traced every living human down to a single male ancestor.
• In 2002, Perelman posted the first of a series of eprints to the arXiv, in which he proved the Poincaré conjecture,
• On 29 July 2005, the discovery of Eris, a Kuiper Belt object larger than Pluto, was announced. In August 2006 Pluto was demoted to a "dwarf planet" after being considered a planet for 76 years. Other "dwarf planets" in our solar system now include Ceres and Eris.
• Space tourism/Private spaceflight began with American Dennis Tito, paying Russia $20 million USD for a week long stay to the International Space Station.
• The Voyager I spacecraft entered the heliosheath, marking its departure from our solar system.
• Scientists discovered water ice on the moon in 2009.
• AFIS and CODIS became the main forensic tools for fingerprint and genetic code investigation in the industrialized world and some developing countries.