Tag Archives: Mars

This spectrogram shows the largest quake ever detected on another planet. The marsquake struck the Red Planet on May 4 , 2022 and measured magnitude 5 . Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/ETH/Zurich. May 4th is unofficially known in sci-fi circles as Star Wars Day (“May the Fourth Be With You”) here on Earth. But, on another planet, far, far away, the date is ...

 The zoomable camera on NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars recently captured a dramatic view of Phobos, the largest of the Red Planet’s two potato-shaped moons, crossing the face of the sun in a solar eclipse lasting a little more than 40 seconds. The Mastcam-Z instrument on the Perseverance rover recorded the solar eclipse April 2, according to NASA’s Jet ...

The supersonic parachute and back shell from NASA’s Perseverance rover on the surface Mars. Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech NASA’s flying drone on Mars has recorded aerial views of debris left behind from the landing of the Perseverance rover last year, showing remarkable details of the craft’s supersonic parachute and part of its aeroshell. The robotic Ingenuity helicopter flew over the parachute and ...

Credit: NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter imaged by the zoomable Mastcam-Z camera on the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU The first-ever powered flights over another planet have proved a resounding success for NASA’s JPL team, which is celebrating Ingenuity’s 12-month anniversary of its first helicopter hop on Mars Tuesday. Some 25 flights later, the Ingenuity helicopter — which hitched a ride to Mars ...

For almost sixty years, robotic missions have been exploring the surface of Mars in search of potential evidence of life. More robotic missions will join in this search in the next fifteen years, the first sample return from Mars (courtesy of the Perseverance rover) will arrive here at Earth, and crewed missions will be sent there. Like their predecessors, these ...

NASA and China plan to mount crewed missions to Mars in the next decade. While this represents a tremendous leap in terms of space exploration, it also presents significant logistical and technological challenges. For starters, missions can only launch for Mars every 26 months when our two planets are at the closest points in their orbit to each other (during ...

Mars is a parched planet ruled by global dust storms. It’s also a frigid world, where night-time winter temperatures fall to -140 C (-220 F) at the poles. But it wasn’t always a dry, barren, freezing, inhospitable wasteland. It used to be a warm, wet, almost inviting place, where liquid water flowed across the surface, filling up lakes, carving channels, ...

Billions of years ago, Mars was a much different place than it is today. During the same period when life was first emerging on Earth, Mars had a thicker atmosphere, warmer surface temperatures, and flowing water on its surface. Evidence of this warmer, wetter past is preserved on the planet’s surface today in the form of river channels, lakebeds, alluvial ...

Is Mars home to an underwater lake? Different researchers are reaching different conclusions. Some say remote sensing from the Mars Express orbiter shows liquid water in an underground lake at Mars’ south polar region. Other researchers say clays or minerals explain the data better. Who’s right? Maybe none of them. A new study says that volcanic rock can explain the ...

Testing is key to the success of any space mission, and the more complex the mission, the more testing is required to complete it successfully.  The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission is one of the most ambitious missions ever undertaken.  It started with the Perseverance rover, which is currently exploring Jezero crater while occasionally stopping to fill sample bottles with ...