This was the year we learned that Mars was habitable billions of years ago, and also that Lady Gaga reportedly intends to be the first artist to sing in outer space in 2015 (will the papa-paparazzi follow?).
Let's take a spin around some of the major science stories from 2013:
Mars is the word
In 2012, we celebrated the spectacular acrobatic arrival of NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. But this year, Curiosity proved its worth as an extraterrestrial scientist, bringing humanity the tantalizing knowledge that life could have once thrived on Mars.
Throughout 2013, scientists announced results from the rover's analyses that revealed new secrets of the Red Planet's history. Clay formations in Mars' Yellowknife Bay indicate an environment that was once favorable to microbial life. The soil contains about 2% water by weight. We also know more about the composition of the planet's atmosphere, which is only 1% as thick as our own.
Meanwhile, a company called Mars One announced its intentions to land four lucky astronauts on Mars in 2025 to begin the first human colonies there. The technology doesn't exist yet to bring anyone back, the company said, so whoever goes will have to stay. More than 200,000 prospective astronauts found this idea attractive enough to apply.
A different group, the Inspiration Mars Foundation, said it wants to send a man and a woman to pass by Mars in 2018, in a round-trip flight without stopping. This made us wonder: Could you survive 501 days in space with your spouse?
Buzz Aldrin, best known for his Apollo 11 moonwalk, has Mars on the mind, too. He wrote on CNN that "we should direct the focus of NASA efforts on establishing a permanent human presence on Mars by the 2030 to 2040 decade."
Elsewhere in spaceFurther afield, one of the biggest space milestones of the year was the crossing of Voyager 1 out of the solar system. There's no border crossing agent out there, so scientists had to figure out on their own whether the probe had truly entered uncharted territory.
The probe, which launched with its twin, Voyager 2, in 1977, made history as the first human-made object to leave the heliosphere, the magnetic boundary separating the solar system's sun, planets and solar wind from the rest of the galaxy. We didn't get confirmation from scientists until well after the actual event took place, though. A study in the journal Science suggests the probe entered the interstellar medium around August 25, 2012.
Also, scientists put together a picture of the universe as a baby, in greater detail than ever before. Thanks to the new data from the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, which studies light left over from the Big Bang, scientists now believe that the universe is about 100 million years older than they thought.
A space telescope with a different mission, called Kepler, gave us hope for finding distant planets with life, but also suffered serious setbacks.
Three Kepler planets announced this year, located about 1,200 light-years away, are considered some of the best candidates so far for hosting life. And astronomers still have two years' worth of Kepler data to plow through, said Bill Borucki, the project's principal scientist. (Using different instruments, astronomers separately found other potentially habitable planets in the Gliese 667 system).
The Kepler space telescope has led scientists to believe that most stars in our galaxy have planets circling them. But the spacecraft ran into some trouble this year: The failure of a control mechanism used to keep the device focused on distant stars with pinpoint accuracy. But NASA says it still hopes to find another role for the craft, which has confirmed the existence of more than 135 planets since its launch in 2009.
In the sky, closer to home
As we tracked the progress of machines that humanity sent out of this world, we also watched out for approaching space rocks -- and not all of them flew by gently.
A whopper of an asteroid gave Earth its closest shave in recorded history. At 150 feet wide, "2012 DA14" slipped in below the moon's orbit on February 15 and squeaked by our planet just 17,200 miles from its surface. Cool Right?
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