2002 in science

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 – The ringed dwarf planet Quaoar is discovered by astronomers Chad Trujillo and Michael Brown at the Palomar Observatory.^[1]
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.^[2]
June 10 – Solar eclipse of June 10, 2002: Annular solar eclipse.
September 25 – 2002 Vitim event: Possible bolide impact in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia.^[3]
December 4 – Solar eclipse of December 4, 2002: Total solar eclipse.

1 March – DNA barcoding of the dodo is published, confirming it as a member of the Columbidae family.^[4]
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.^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]

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.^[9] 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.^[10]
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.

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

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.

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

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.^[11]
May – Experimental discovery of a new type of radioactivity: the 2-protons radioactivity.^[12]^[13]

February – Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in the eye identified by Samer Hattar and colleagues.^[14]^[15]
May 14 – Red wine is claimed by Spanish researchers to protect against the common cold.^[16]
June – The gene BRAF is shown to be faulty (mutated) in some human cancers.^[17]
November – Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic begins in Guangdong province of China.^[18]
December 19 – Clozapine is the first drug approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for reducing the risk of suicidal behaviour.

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.^[19]

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.