Mars

Billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin will launch a mission to Mars for NASA. This information was confirmed by the space agency, writes The Register. We are talking about the ESCAPADE mission to study the electromagnetic fields of the Red Planet. To do this, Blue Origin will launch two spacecraft using ... Read more

NASA has temporarily lost contact with the Mars exploration spacecraft, reports Engadget. The situation is expected and explained by an astronomical phenomenon known as a solar conjunction. During it, the Earth and Mars move on opposite sides of the Sun and form a straight line with it. During this period, ... Read more

NASA’s Perseverance rover recorded a dust vortex moving along the western edge of the Martian crater Jezero. This is stated in the report of the space agency. The event was recorded on August 30, 2023. The data obtained indicate that the dust vortex was moving at a speed of about ... Read more

NASA’s Perseverance rover is setting new speed records on Mars thanks to the AutoNav automatic navigation system, writes Gizmodo. The trip from June 26 to July 31, during which the rover overcame Snowdrift Peak, was indicative. Perseverance covered the distance of 759 meters in about a third of the time ... Read more

The use of airbrushed solar sails for traveling to Mars and interstellar space can significantly reduce the time and fuel required for such missions. The study was published in the journal Acta Astronautica, writes Universe Today. Dr. René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research ... Read more

Only 22 people may be enough to colonize Mars, but they need to have certain personality types. However, not everyone agrees with this theory – some scientists suggest that the colony will need more people, writes Live Science. To estimate how many people would be needed to colonize the planet, ... Read more

NASA and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have announced that Lockheed Martin has been selected to design, build and test a propulsion system that could accelerate travel to Mars. This is reported by The New York Times. The corresponding $499 million program is called DRACO, short for ... Read more

The Mars rover Perseverance has found evidence of organic compounds in the Lake Crater on Mars. This was reported by Engadget with reference to a study in the journal Nature. While not definitive proof that life once existed on Mars — these compounds could have formed non-biologically — the study’s ... Read more

Four volunteers will spend 378 days in a 3D-printed virtual simulation of Mars under NASA supervision in preparation for a real mission to the Red Planet, writes New York Post. This experiment involves research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist ... Read more

Impulse Space and Relativity Space have announced plans to launch the first commercial mission to Mars in 2026. This is reported by SpaceNews. The idea of launching a mission is not new for them. The company announced such intentions last year, but then the mission was being prepared for launch ... Read more

Scientists from Bruce Murray Space Image Laboratory (California Institute of Technology) created the most detailed map of Mars, which can be viewed at the institution’s website. This is reported by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 110,000 images taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) were used to create an interactive map ... Read more

Scientists have proposed a new way to optimize the search for life on Mars by training artificial intelligence to identify places most likely to contain “biosignatures” (signs of life). A new deep learning system was trained to find biosignatures in the harsh conditions of Chile’s Atacama Desert, which is the ... Read more

NASA’s Curiosity rover recently discovered some of the most compelling evidence of ancient water on Mars. This evidence is rippled stones formed by the waves. These ripples formed billions of years ago when the surface of Mars was still covered with water. Probes around the planet are exploring these ancient ... Read more

NASA is returning to the idea of sending people to Mars. It is collaborating with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to test a nuclear rocket engine in space with the goal of using the technology for manned missions to the Red Planet. The agencies hope to demonstrate advanced ... Read more

NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered a large number of opals on Mars that could help solve the question of whether life ever existed on the Red Planet and provide water for any future human missions to the Martian surface. Considered a gemstone, opals display shimmering colors that usually look like ... Read more

The InSight lander, tasked with detecting Martian earthquakes, has now officially ended its mission and will remain on the flat plains of the Martian surface as dust slowly collects on its solar cells and other instruments. The final stop of the device did not come as a surprise to NASA. ... Read more

Results of a new study on the viability of turbines as an energy source for future Mars missions suggest that wind power could become an important basis for energy production on the Red Planet, assuming humans can successfully land there in the coming decades. Scientists have generally not considered wind ... Read more

Scientists have confirmed that a huge asteroid crashed into Mars about 3.4 billion years ago, at a time when the planet had a huge ocean in which microbes could live. The researchers, led by Alexis Rodriguez, a senior scientist at the Institute of Planetary Sciences, identified a likely location, called ... Read more

NASA’s Perseverance rover has been searching for signs of life on Mars since it landed in an ancient lake on the Red Planet in February 2021. In a trio of new studies, scientists have revealed some details about the habitable conditions that once existed on Mars, while limiting the chances ... Read more

Researchers have found that NASA’s InSight rover recorded a Martian earthquake in the Amazonis Planitia region on December 24, 2021, which was the result of a falling meteorite – the first time the mission witnessed the formation of a crater on the planet. Scientists found this out by looking at ... Read more

Swiss watchmaker Omega has teamed up with the European Space Agency (ESA) to create a new model, the Speedmaster X-33 Marstimer, which shows Earth and Martian time. The MTS function tracks the date and time on both planets, taking into account that time on Mars is 39 minutes longer than ... Read more

The James Webb Space Telescope is taking the first pictures of the planets in the Solar System, the latest series of which could be especially useful. NASA and ESA shared the first images of Mars, taken on September 5, that will provide a new understanding of the planet’s atmosphere, reports ... Read more

In just a year and a half of its stay on Mars, the Perseverance rover found many samples of rocks, as well as an intriguing organic substance in the rocks of the planet, reports CNET. In particular, Mars Perseverance collected two samples of a mudstone rock called Wildcat Ridge, which ... Read more

A lunchbox-sized robot has been producing oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere since February 2021, reports PCMag. MIT announced that the Mars Oxygen Resources Experiment (MOXIE) was deployed as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover mission. Over a year and a half, “MOXIE was able to produce oxygen on ... Read more

Aircraft on Mars is increasing. NASA plans to send two more helicopters to the Red Planet. They will be similar to Ingenuity, which is already operating on Mars. The new helicopters will have to pick up sample tubes collected by the Perseverance rover and transfer them to a lander nearby ... Read more