Category: Mars

A system of lagoons has been discovered in Argentina hosting a rare range of microbial communities previously unknown to scientists. The microbial communities form giant mounds of rock as they grow — like corals building a reef millimeter by millimeter. And the University of Colorado points out that “the communities could also provide scientists with…

New analysis of data from the Curiosity rover reveals that much of the craters on Mars today could have once been habitable rivers. “We’re finding evidence that Mars was likely a planet of rivers,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author on a new paper announcing the discovery. “We…

Scientists have greater insight into the atmospheric conditions on Mars than ever before following an international research project involving the University of Huddersfield. The findings of the project will help them identify safe landing sites with increased accuracy, and further paves the way for the first manned mission to the red planet. More here

The type of carbon is associated with biological processes on Earth. Curiosity scientists offer several explanations for the unusual carbon signals. After analyzing powdered rock samples collected from the surface of Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover, scientists have announced that several of the samples are rich in a type of carbon that on Earth is…

NASA scientists say that the eruption of a submarine volcano in Tonga is helping them to understand how features formed on the surfaces of Mars and Venus. The unusual explosion — which has been calculated at more than 500 times the force of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 — is offering…

More than 30 scientists across mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau are rushing to process data collected by China’s Mars rover, Zhurong, and by the nation’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which is in orbit around the planet. Several studies have trickled out, but researchers say that more are coming in the next weeks and months, offering insights…

Evidence of ancient life may have been scrubbed from parts of Mars, a new NASA study has found. The space agency’s Curiosity rover made the surprising discovery while investigating clay-rich sedimentary rocks around its landing site in Gale Crater, a former lake that was made when an asteroid struck the Red Planet roughly 3.6 billion…

t has been a week of heightened apprehension on the Mars Helicopter team as we prepared a major flight challenge for Ingenuity. We uplinked instructions for the flight, which occurred Monday, July 5 at 2:03 am PT, and waited nervously for results to arrive from Mars later that morning. The mood in the ground control…

CURIOSITY’S SKYCRANE MANEUVER In this artist’s concept, Curiosity is in the final moments of its descent toward Mars, and is being lowered from the descent stage to the surface on three cables. NASA / JPL Entry, descent, and landing for Curiosity will include a combination of technologies inherited from past NASA Mars missions, as well as new…

NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission landed on the Red Planet on July 4, 1997. It’s tiny rover, named Sojourner after abolitionist Sojourner Truth, spent 83 days of a planned seven-day mission exploring the Martian terrain, acquiring images, and taking chemical, atmospheric and other measurements. When the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft approached its destination, no NASA mission had successfully reached…

Space Mission and Science News | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory    The last time we saw NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission was on July 30, 2020, as it disappeared into the black of deep space on a trajectory for Mars. But with NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System, you can follow in real time as…

2020_Mars In October 2020 Mars will be roughly the closest it gets to Earth. This close approach is call an “opposition” and means that the Earth and Mars are on the same side of the Sun. This happens about once every two years. Here’s a great and detailed overview of this event.   THE 2020-2021 PERIHELIC…

China’s successful launch of Mars mission seals global era in deep-space exploration   Tianwen-1 is the second of three spacecraft set to take off this month for the red planet. A Chinese spacecraft is on its way to Mars after launching successfully from Hainan Island in southern China. The mission — named Tianwen-1, which means…

  You can help a Mars Rover’s AI learn to tell rocks from dirt – TechCrunch   Curiosity doesn’t navigate on its own; there’s a whole team of people on Earth who analyze the imagery coming back from Mars and plot a path forward for the mobile science laboratory. In order to do so, however,…