NASA in 2012 was amazing. It included ice on mercury, Orion space craft, shuttle retirement, ice sheet loss, and technology.

In Mercury, there was proven to be ice when a shuttle landed in March 2011. The polar regions of mercury seem to have enough ice to cover 2 miles. Even though Mercury is only the fourth planet away from the sun, there are parts of Mercury that don’t get sunlight.

The Orion space craft was welcomed in July and can carry astronauts farther into space than other spaceships could before. It gives emergency in capability and is the most advanced design of a spaceship.

After the NASA space shuttles ended in 2011, they all headed to museums and to new homes in 2012. The space shuttle, Atlantis has been running for 26 years and has traveled over 125,935,769 miles in 307 days and has been welcomed to Space Florida Exploration Park as its new home.

All sizes | Endeavour | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

With NASA’s instruments, they have discovered that the ice sheets in Greenland have been disappearing. Ice disappearing has increased over the last 20 years and about two thirds of the ice is Greenland while the rest is from Antarctica.

There are over 800 technology projects coming in from 2012. The NASA Space Technology Program had been launched last year in 2012 and they also have been creating this new robot. NASA has had an extremely good year and has had tons of adventures.