Few things seem to capture the imagination of quite like astronomy and space exploration, and 2015 certainly was a banner year on that front. This New Year’s Day, we at redOrbit thought it would be a good idea to take a look back at the year’s most epic space achievements and news stories.

1. Mars has liquid water

Mars was certainly a hot topic throughout the past 12 months, with NASA making preparations to send astronauts to the Red Planet in the near future and the Curiosity rover still going strong on the its surface. The biggest Mars-related story of 2015, however, had to be the discovery of hydrated salts on the planet’s surface, providing new evidence of liquid water.

The hydrated salts were found in recurring slope lineae—or dark features of precipitated salt that can be up to five meters wide and as much as 100 meters long—and while scientists have not yet actually seen any H2O on present-day Mars, NASA called the paper, published in September in the journal Nature Geoscience, “the strongest evidence yet” that it is there.

2. Finding Pluto’s heart

Much farther out into the solar system, the US space agency’s New Horizon probe completed a close flyby of Pluto and its moons, passing within 8,000 miles of the dwarf planet in July. Since then, a wealth of information both about the distant world and the satellites orbiting it have been published in various scientific journals, and there’s still much more to come!

Among the many breakthroughs logged thus far: the identification of a heart-shaped feature that was named Tombaugh Regio in honor of the man who first discovered the planet; the discovery that Pluto is apparently geologically active, despite the belief that is had been dormant for many, many years; and the fact that it has a terrain unlike anything ever seen in our solar system.

Most recently, NASA released infrared images of the dwarf planet captured by New Horizons’ Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) that had been translated into real, visible color and then one-upped themselves by releasing an amazing video compilation of those pics—and since data and photos are set to come through summer, the best may be yet to come!

3. Ceres’ bright spots are made of salt

Like New Horizons, the US space agency’s Dawn spacecraft has been busy studying a dwarf planet—in this case, Ceres. One of the biggest puzzles of the year for space scientists was the nature of the mysterious bright spots on surface of Ceres. The answer came in last month, when NASA revealed that they were made of hexahydrite, a type of magnesium sulfate.

4. Most Earth-like world to date

The Kepler planet-hunting mission was also active throughout 2015, and in July, it located the most Earth-like world to date. That object was named Kepler-452b, and it was the first object of its kind to be roughly the same size as our homeworld while orbiting a sun-like G2 star at just the right distance for liquid water to be able to form on its surface.

5. Honorable mentions

Sadly, there just isn’t enough space here to give in-depth coverage to all of the really cool space research and discoveries that came over the past 12 months, so we’ll wrap things up with a look at some of our “honorable mentions,” including Scott Kelly and the Year In Space mission, the discovery of a global ocean on Saturn’s moon Enceladus by Cassini, and milestones in reusable rocket technology from both Blue Origin and SpaceX.

Need more? Check out our Space News page for more of 2015’s top stories!

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Feature Image: NASA/APL/SwRI

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