Incredible Photos from NASA

The SPIDER project started in the 2000s. It was made to map the thermal afterglow of the Big Bang. A giant helium balloon that carried SPIDER 115,000 feet above Antarctica, it landed in a remote region there. Most of the data was stored on hard drives on SPIDER, which had to be recovered from the landing site. This photo is of SPIDER in January before it launched.

RoboSimian is an ape-like robot with four limbs that it uses to move around. It was designed in the JPL and will compete in the DARPA robotics competition this year.

This is a still from a movie NASA made about the progression of its NEOWISE survey during the mission's first year which started in December 2013. Green dots represent near-Earth objects and gray circles are all other asteroids. In that year, NEOWISE discovered 40 near-Earth objects.

In a Lockheed Martin room in Denver, these technicians prepare InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations) Mars lander for leak testing. This testing was done in October, and the mission is supposed to launch in 2016. It should land on Mars six months after that.

The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission will show global maps of soil so that we can see water availability on planet Earth, which will hopefully help guide policy decisions. It's a three-year mission that launched in January 2015.

The Mars rover took a pretty solid selfie back in January, showing off the drilling sites on the planet. "Pahrump Hills" is where the rover has been working for five months. This photo was assembled from many different selfies the rover took.

This is an artist's rendering of the Dawn spacecraft headed toward dwarf planet Ceres. It's scheduled to arrive on March 6. Ceres is located on the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn is the first spacecraft to reach a dwarf planet and orbit two worlds in deep space, according to NASA.

In the past year, NASA has added five satellite missions. The missions orbit Earth and give researchers a new look at carbon dioxide levels, precipitation, ocean winds, and particles in the atmosphere.