Enlarge / NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter has been flying across the red planet for more than a year. (credit: NASA) The achievement of powered flight on another world is one of the great spaceflight feats of the last decade. Since its first brief hop on April 19, 2021, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter has subsequently made […]
April 2, 2021, solar eclipse on Mars. When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021, it carried a high-definition video camera, complete with a powerful zoom capability. This camera has since provided all sorts of amazing views of the red planet during the last 14 months. However, earlier this month operators of rover turned […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA/CXO/University College London/W. Dunn et al; Optical: W. M. Keck Observatory ) Late in 2021, the astronomy community released its decadal survey , a roadmap of scientific priorities for the next 10 years, which describes the hardware we’d need to build in order to achieve them. That survey was focused on distant objects […]
Enlarge / SpaceX’s stacked Starship vehicle complete with its impressive launch tower. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann) STARBASE, Texas—Shortly after SpaceX founder Elon Musk completed a 75-minute presentation on Starship Thursday evening, I huddled with a few veteran space reporters. What, we discussed, were the headlines from the event? No one was sure, as we agreed that […]
Enlarge / The string of interrupted bright patches moving from top left to lower right is a channel filled with salt deposits. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) By now, there’s plenty of evidence that Mars had a watery past, and more data is coming in all the time. But that evidence doesn’t necessarily give us a complete picture of Mars’ […]
Enlarge / InSight places a wind shield over its seismometer. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA’s InSight lander installed a seismograph on Mars, and the marsquakes it detected have helped us map the planet’s interior. This data provides the big picture of Mars’ internals—how big the core is, whether anything is molten, and so on. But it doesn’t […]
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired this image using its navigation camera during its thin-atmosphere flight this week. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Nearly seven months have passed since NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made its first groundbreaking flight on Mars. Since that initial tentative hovering above the surface of Mars, Ingenuity has flown a progression of longer, more significant, and scientifically […]
Enlarge / New whole-hemisphere image of Mars captured by the UAE “Hope” probe. (credit: Emirates Mars Mission) Since arriving at Mars eight months ago, the Emirates Mars Mission has quietly begun to deliver some intriguing scientific data about the Martian atmosphere and its weather patterns. Named “Hope, ” the probe will be in a relatively […]
Enlarge / The rocks of Kodiak Butte record a lot of the history of Jezero Crater. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS) Normally, it takes some time for NASA’s Mars rovers to return scientific data. The instruments need to be calibrated and commissioned, and the rover needs to move off from the landing site toward a bit of the […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA) Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a new milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life: drilling into Mars to extract a plug of rock, which will eventually get fired back to Earth for scientists to study. Data sent to NASA scientists early on August 6 indicated a victory—the robot had indeed […]