Check out NASA's 21 best photos of the year

On September 24, 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft dropped off a sample return capsule containing rocky bits of asteroid Bennu. The capsule landed in the Utah desert, delivering a total of 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams) of material.

Once on Earth, curation teams transported the samples to a clean room for processing. NASA struggled to open a round sampler head at the end of an articulated arm that the spacecraft used to grab the sample before finally cracking it open on January 10 of this year.

This stellar photo shows Russia’s Soyuz rocket launching with Expedition 70 NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, on September 15, 2023.

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonaut Dmitri Petelin are seen here minutes after landing in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan inside the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft on September 27, 2023.

Rubio logged 371 days in space as members of Expeditions 68-69 aboard the International Space Station (ISS), breaking the record for the longest single spaceflight by a U.S. astronaut in history.

The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft is seen here being hoisted on board the recovery ship Megan shortly after landing in the Atlantic Ocean on September 4, 2023, carrying NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

The space agency donated this aerial prototype of the Mars Helicopter to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steve F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Earlier this year, Ingenuity busted its blades and ended its mission on the Red Planet.

In April 2023, four astronauts were selected for the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. NASA revealed the identities of the four-person crew for the Artemis 2 mission: NASA astronauts Victor Glover, who will serve as pilot for the mission, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman as mission specialists, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen as mission commander.

NASA’s Psyche mission to explore a metal rich asteroid launched on board a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on October 13, 2023 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A group of Amazonian leaders visited NASA’s Earth Information Center on November 17, 2023, to discuss how data gathered by the space agency can be used to help protect the Amazon.

This NASA photo shows a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Dragon spacecraft on top of the launch pad at the space agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida before the launch of the Crew-7 mission on August 26, 2023.

NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Jessica Watkins, and Robert Hines took part in STEM demonstrations with students at the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library on March 30, 2023.

This photo shows Russia’s Soyuz rocket after being rolled out by train to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 12, 2023. The rocket launched Expedition 70 NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, and Nikolai Chub to the ISS.

A sample from asteroid Bennu is shown here being prepared atop a microscope slide at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The museum unveiled the first public display of the asteroid sample on November 3, 2023.

NASA astronaut Alvin Drew poses for a photo with an adorable astronaut-wannabe during the White House Easter Egg Roll on April 10, 2023.

The Russian Search and Recovery Forces’ All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) team are shown here while preparing for the landing of the Expedition 69 astronauts on September 27, 2023.

NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Jessica Watkins, and Robert Hines looking at an interactive recreation of the ISS observatory module, called Cupola, at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Students are shown here taking part in a Minecraft Artemis demonstration during Space Education Day on June 20, 2023, at the Microsoft Technology Center in Arlington, Virginia.

Thir photo shows Lockheed Martin System Safety Engineer Victoria Thiem and On Scene Commander of Recovery Stuart Wylie performing preliminary checks on the sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission shortly after it landed in the Utah desert.

NASA’s Artemis 2 crew speaking at the White House on December 14, 2023.

NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, NASA associate administrator Bob Cabana, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson are seen here speaking with the 2021 astronaut candidate class at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building in Washington on October 18, 2023.

A version of this article originally appeared on Gizmodo.