Did someone leave a communicator badge lying on Mars? NASA’s long-running Curiosity rover mission just spotted a familiar shape to “Star Trek” fans: The iconic delta-shaped emblem that Starfleet officers typically wear on their uniforms. Unfortunately, it would be highly illogical to say that a Starfleet landing party walked near Curiosity’s roving grounds, as the … Read more
Scientists in China have created a robot chemist powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can extract oxygen from Martian water without human supervision. Synthesizing useful resources from local materials on Mars will be essential for humans’ survival on the Red Planet. Extracting oxygen from materials — in a process called oxygen evolution reaction (OER) — is particularly … Read more
After more than a year together on the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance rover and its hitchhiking “pet rock” have finally parted ways. The stone had been lodged in one of the rover’s wheels for more than half of its mission on Mars. Perseverance accidentally picked up the pet rock in its front left wheel on … Read more
The guy who bought Twitter wants to have a city of a million people on Mars by 2050. That may sound astronomically ambitious considering humans have never set foot on the Martian surface. But is it feasible? How long would it take for humans to colonize another planet? And could it ever be possible for … Read more
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has captured stunning images of almost perfectly round sand dunes on the surface of the Red Planet. While sand dunes of all shapes and sizes are common on Mars, circular dunes like these are a rare sight. The dunes appear as slightly asymmetrical splodges in the picture, which was taken … Read more
Scientists studying the surface of Mars recently found a piece of the rocky planet smiling back at them. In an image shared Jan. 25 by The University of Arizona (opens in new tab) (UA), what appears to be the face of an enormous Martian teddy bear — complete with two beady eyes, a button nose … Read more
NASA has revealed plans to create a nuclear-powered rocket that could send astronauts to Mars in just 45 days. The agency, which has partnered with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design the rocket, announced on Tuesday (Jan. 24) that it could build a working nuclear thermal rocket engine as soon as … Read more
An ancient, dried-up lake bed on Mars may be teeming with opal gemstones, new data from NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover suggests. Beyond giving the cracked surface of Mars’ Gale Crater a semiprecious glint, these opals could be evidence that water and rock have been interacting beneath the Martian surface much more recently than was previously … Read more
For decades, astronomers assumed that Mars was geodynamically dead — a planet without rumbling earthquakes and erupting volcanoes. Though remnants of towering volcanoes exist on the surface of the Red Planet today, these colossal structures have been dormant for millions of years. With little to no heat firing the planet’s engine, scientists reasoned, Mars became … Read more
A towering dust storm that engulfed the Mars Perseverance rover in September 2021 was a colossal 390.4 feet (119 meters) tall, the first-ever audio recording of a dust devil on the surface of Mars reveals. The recording, an analysis of which was published Tuesday (Dec. 13) in the journal Nature Communications (opens in new tab), … Read more
