As far as humans are concerned, the most important part of a spaceship isn't the turbodrive or the turbolifts or even the turbolasers. No, it's the life support system, the thing that keeps us from, you know, dying. These systems are generally bulky and complex, but a new concept from NASA would weave them directly into spaceship hulls instead.

Like everything they build, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) designed Curiosity's Sky Crane landing system to work. But nothing is guaranteed in spaceflight. The team wouldn't know for sure whether the mission's entry, descent, and landing (or EDL) was successful until they got confirmation from the rover. The problem was that Curiosity's landing site in Gale Crater would be out of range at touchdown, so the team brought in a communications relay: the Mars Odyssey orbiter. It was a simple and obvious solution, except that Odyssey experienced its first ever malfunctions weeks before Curiosity's landing.

One of the slightly more bizarre things that Einstein predicted to go along with all of his relativity and whatnot was a phenomenon called gravitational waves, where waves of gravitational energy would propagate through the fabric of space itself. We've never managed to catch one in action, but astronomers have found new evidence that they exist.

The WISE space-based infrared survey telescope has completed two surveys of the sky in the infrared, revealing millions of new supermassive (and ravenous) black holes called quasars. And we weren't exactly looking for Hot DOGs out there, but we found a bunch of 'em anyway.