Dec 29, 2014 12:52 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

While NASA continues to progress its mission to send astronauts to Mars, the agency took time recently to reflect on the year they had in 2014.

NASA took a major step in its Orion mission, by sending the spacecraft into Earth's atmosphere to have it re-enter and land in the Pacific Ocean. Charles Bolden, NASA administrator, called the test flight a "huge step" in the "Journey to Mars."

"We continued to make great progress on our journey to Mars this year, awarding contracts to American companies who will return human space flight launches to U.S. soil, advancing space technology development; and successfully completing the first flight of Orion, the next deep space spacecraft in which our astronauts will travel," Bolden said in the agency's year-end review. "We moved forward on our work to create quieter, greener airplanes and develop technologies to make air travel more efficient; and we advanced our study of our changing home planet, Earth, while increasing our understanding of others in our solar system and beyond."

From the release, here are the most significant events in space in 2014.

Curiosity: 2014 will be remembered as the year NASA's latest rover on Mars reached Mount Sharp, the machine's ultimate scientific destination. Since arriving, Curiosity has found even more evidence of water once existing on Mars.

MAVEN: while Curiosity inspects the Gale Crater's great mountain, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution will continue to look for specific reasons for why the Red Planet's atmosphere deteriorated.

ISS: the 14th year on the International Space Station was not entirely hiccup free and those onboard certainly had their fair share of scares. But NASA was able to send tools there without spending big money to fly them up, thanks to 3-D printing. 2014 also saw private companies make huge strides in space travel, which included ISS resupply missions.

The Rosetta Mission is deserving of an honorable mission, even though it was led by the European Space Agency. With NASA looking on and helping in some capacity, the world watched a satellite land on a comet for the first time ever.

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