1. On August 5, 2012, NASA landed a rover named Curiosity on Mars. The rover cost $2.5 billion dollars and weighs 900 kilograms, or 1 ton. Curiosity is a six wheeled all-terrain vehicle that carries ten research instruments and seventeen separate cameras. This rover is sending back pictures Spaand samples and has been very helpful to scientists.

2. Scientists have discovered evidence of ice on Mercury. According to a spacecraft that has been orbiting Mercury since March 2012, there is frozen water on the poles of Mercury. For a long time, astronomers suspected that the shiny patches on Mercury’s poles were ice. In November, a spacecraft named MESSENGER, which stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging, This proves that there is frozen water on Mercury which means it might support life.

3. In July 2012, an estimate of 97% of ice sheet surface melted in Greenland. On average, about half of Greenland’s ice sheet naturally melts every summer. This extreme thawing was probably caused by an unusually strong ridge of warm air, or a heat dome over Greenland.

4. Space shuttle Endeaver retired on September 21, 2012, as it toured California on the back of NASA’s modified 747 carrier aircraft. After flying over Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast, they Griffith Observatory, the Hollywood sign, Dodger Stadium, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Malibu and Santa Monica, Disneyland, The Queen Mary and USS Iowa in Long Beach harbor, and several low-level flyovers over Los Angeles International Airport before landing down on the runway.

5. NASA has designed the first spacecraft to fly astronauts beyond Earth’s orbit since the Apollo spacecrafts. Orion will orbit Earth without a crew and return through the atmosphere at speeds way faster than when astronauts last returned from the moon in 1972. The mission is planned for launch in September 2014. It will orbit the Earth twice on a track that will take it more than 3,600 miles above the ground, which is about 15 times higher than the International Space Station.