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2013: A Space Odyssey - a cosmological review of the year

Asteroids 'n' comets, our new home Mars and the adventures of Jade Rabbit

OK, we're not quite ready...

However, just earlier this month, the not-for-profit foundation had to admit that its 2016 goal for this small demo craft was a tad optimistic and it would be more like 2018 before it got off the ground to help provide some proofs-of-concept for colony technologies.

Indeed, despite the plucky optimism of these Martian dreamers, there's a hell of lot of technology that needs to be realised before anyone is going to be vacationing on Mars, as DSI's Rick Tumlinson and Virgin Galactic's George Whitesides told The Reg. And, video applications and reality telly aside, it's not going to be easy to find the right people for the job.

Water, water everywhere

While we wait for these missions to get off the ground, there is the constant stream of news from the Martian planet surface to be had from NASA's nuclear space rover Curiosity. The list of its accomplishments is long, but suffice it to say that the rover cleaned up some rocks, got ready to drill into the surface, then actually drilled into the planet. But ultimately, the space truck took a sample that answered the fundamental question of its mission, could Mars ever have supported life? A question that NASA boffins can now say yes to after finding evidence of significant traces of water in the Martian soil.

Gale Crater Lake

PICTURES OF THE YEAR: Curiosity trundled through this area on Mars this year, which was a crater lake 3.5bn years ago. Full story here.

Along the way to this revelation, Curiosity suffered a storage glitch that sent it into safe mode and went back into the same state shortly after the big announcement because of a software bug. But neither these glitches nor a government shutdown in October could stop the rover from trucking on across the Martian surface.

As it trundles onwards, the rover has used its own sense of direction to decide where to go, found evidence of what may once have been streams on the Red Planet and helped scientists conclude that Mars could have lost its atmosphere within the first billion years of its history.

Curiosity isn't the only rover that likes to keep on trucking either, elderly Martian statesman the Opportunity rover celebrated its ninth anniversary this year. The NASA truck launched in 2003 has lasted 36 times longer than it was expected to and contributed to the evidence that Mars was once a hospitable place to be with finds like a patch of "blueberries" believed to have been formed by microbes and evidence of flowing water.

The little rover that could also set the record this year for the farthest distance travelled by an extraterrestrial NASA space truck, beaten only by the Russian Lunokhod 2 vehicle, which roamed the face of the Moon back in the 1970s. Opportunity has covered 35.76km in its nine years on Mars, moving mostly at its customary leisurely pace of 10mm an hour.

Houston, we have a problem

Speaking of aging spacecraft, it was another eventful year for the International Space Station, filled with comings and goings and glitches and leaks. The lighter moments aboard the station came mostly courtesy of Commander Chris Hadfield, who sang Space Oddity and chatted with William Shatner.

London from the International Space Station, credit Commander Hadfield

PICTURES OF THE YEAR: Commander Hadfield's snap of London from the ISS. Full story here.

There was also some good news with the announcement of the first bona-fide British astronaut in space, Tim Peake. Although British-born 'nauts Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick have all been in space, they did so as US citizens, while Peake is the first to go up as a Brit, on behalf of the European Space Agency.

But the ISS has had a bumpy ride this year. Hadfield reported in May that the station was leaking the ammonia coolant it needs for its power systems into space. The station crew had to prep for an emergency spacewalk to fix the problem, though spirits were kept high by their ever cheerful tweeting commander:

Luckily, flight engineers Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn were able to plug the leak on the orbiting science lab, paving the way for their crewmates to set off on their journey home to Earth, bringing Hadfield's time on the station to an end.

That wasn't the only hiccup at the ISS this year though. The biggest narrowly-averted disaster in space happened on European Space Agency 'naut Luca Parmitano's second spacewalk. Parmitano had already made history by becoming the first Italian to take a jaunt in the cosmos in July. On his second expedition, however, things went rather spectacularly wrong when his helmet started filling up with water, threatening to subject him to the rather odd death of drowning in space.

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