gear Push settings
Shields up!
Life can be surprisingly hardy.
"Producing > packing" -- NASA.
It's a pretty pretty city, too.
Things just got a whole lot more complicated.
Worry and excitement, all in one paper.
Where's my toothbrush?
Findings alien life on barren planet like Mars seems unlikely, but the discovery of the century might that of past life.
While taking its usual stroll on Mars, the Curiosity Rover found something unexpected: a dark, smooth meteorite.
It's because of all that iron-rich dust, but it's not clear how it got there.
Footage from the crime scene.
Things just got serious.
The bad news starts to sink in.
The little rover that could.
After 8 months in space, ESA's crafts are approaching the martian surface.
Yet another audacious plan from the billionaire entrepreneur.
The rocks from Mars are surprisingly familiar.
NASA's year-long Mars simulation experiment has concluded today.
The Chinese space program is taking huge strides forward.
We have touched Mars. There is life on Mars, and it is us—extensions of our eyes in all directions, extensions of our mind, extensions of our heart and soul… — Ray Bradbury, science fiction author, speaking at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, October 8, 1976 Traveling to Mars has been the dream of many […]
While the size of Mars' moons is laughable, some scientists believe the Red Planet used to have many more moons.
Mars is full of secrets, but we're unraveling them one by one.
But maybe our neighbour wasn't always so red-faced after all.
Food grown on Mars has been officially declared edible.
Mars will be very safe and very comfortable one day. But first it's going to be harsh and unwelcoming.
Swirling patterns in the ice of Mars' North Pole suggest the planet is emerging out of a long ice age that began some 370,000 years ago. The findings are extremely important for climate change, improving our understanding of both Mars' and Earth's climate.
NASA astronomers captured a beautiful image of Mars on May 12, when the planet was just 50 million miles away from Earth. Bright snow-capped polar regions and rolling clouds above the rusty landscape show that Mars is a dynamic, seasonal planet, not an inert rock barreling through space.
Here's something you'd never expect to happen in a place with average temperatures of -67 degrees Fahrenheit -- Mars' flowing water is boiling!
All aboard the hype train!
If we want to have a permanent or long-term mission to Mars, then growing crops locally would be very useful.
Researchers at European Space Agency (ESA) collected fungi that live in one of the harshest places on Earth -- McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica -- then shipped some to the ISS. Here, populations were subjected to both a Martian environment and directly exposed to space. In both situations, fungi survived after 18 months though those breeding in the Martian environment proved to be far better adapted. Lichen were also tested under the same circumstances. These too survived, which gives hope that there might be a chance for life on Mars to exist.
Scientists want to grow potatoes on Mars to study crop resilience in the face of climate change. Brilliant or stupid?
If everything goes according to plan, we'll be going to Mars in the mid 2030s - using these suits.
Geological maps can be awesome here on Earth, but when we have geological maps of extraterrestrial bodies... that's when we get really excited.
NASA figured out how Mars transformed from a lush environment to a red desert.
With today's propulsion tech, it takes at least 1.5 years for a manned crew to reach Mars, and at least as much to get back - provided there's a return mission. There's only so much that can fit in a spacecraft, and besides the supplies astronauts need for the long trip, there's precious cargo that's required to sustain the mission on site like construction materials, lab equipment, food and so on. Remember the last time you went camping? Well, this time we're headed to another planet and forgetting about toiler paper is the least of your worries. But when NASA handles logistics, you know things are tight to the last bolt. Sometimes, outside help and fresh minds are more than welcome, which is why the space agency held a very interesting competition called the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge Design Competition which awards the most innovative, but practical designs of habitats on Mars.
After the glorious Apollo missions that led humans to the Moon for the first time, it's time for a new Golden Age of space exploration - and NASA has a solid plan for that.
During an extraordinary conference hosted by NASA, a team of researchers report that flowing briny water is flowing out of Martian mountain slopes. Let that sink in for a moment. Now, time to pull yourself together and check out some more details.
NASA recently uploaded a strikingly beautiful photograph on their website showing a petrified sand dune on Mars. The image was actually pieced together from several shots taken using Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) on August 27th. From end to end, the panorama spans a full 135 degrees of other-worldly awesomeness, with east to the left and southwest to the right.
Shipping cyanobacteria to Mars or dumping greenhouse gas into its thin atmosphere might be too slow. Elon Musk is in a hurry, considering he wants to see an 80,000 people colony on Mars during his lifetime. A more drastic, quick fix way of terraforming Mars might be nuking its poles, Musk suggested on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, this Wednesday. "You're a supervillain!" Colbert said. "That's what a supervillain does!"
Cryogenic sleep is usually the stuff of science fiction, most recently featured in the award winning blockbuster Interstellar. Of course, the most epic display of cryosleep can be found in Alien, in my humble opinion. Nevertheless, the theme is the same: cosmic voyagers are suspended in a sort of low metabolic state where vital functions are kept to a bear minimum by cooling the body, while not actually killing the person. It's quite useful, especially when you consider interstellar travel involving years, decades or even perhaps centuries of traveling. It's no wonder then that NASA is interested in actually turning this into a real-life application.
Buzz Aldrin, the second man to ever set foot on the Moon and one of the most respected and vocal astronauts, will serve as a research professor for aeronautics and senior faculty adviser for the Florida Institute of Technology. He will be spearheading the "Buzz Aldrin Space Institute", whose main purpose will be to create a plan for a permanent settlement on Mars by 2040.
If we want to send people to Mars, we're going to need some bigger engines - and that's exactly what NASA's building right now. In fact, we're going to need the most complex engine ever built by mankind.
Mars is now a cold and dry place, but it wasn't always like this - the Red Planet used to have a lot of water on its surface. Now, researchers have discovered one of the very last places where (potentially habitable) liquid water existed on Mars.
NASA is preparing to send a drone to Mars by 2024 - they've already developed a small, lightweight craft that could conduct aerial surveys and identify potential landing areas and zones of interest.
Sampling impact glass from the ancient craters that litter the surface for Mars might prove key to settling a long debate: did Mars ever harbor life? Researchers at NASA believe this is a great lead after the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) currently hovering above the red planet found deposits of glass. These were formed by impacts with large asteroids, whose blast trapped and preserved any matter it came across: dust, soil or any plants or bacteria (if there ever were such things). Cracking open these glass time capsules and peering inside could, thus, be one of the best places to look for.
Mars has auroras too, and in addition to the red and green tinted Northern Lights here on Earth, these also come in blue. According to NASA, these should be visible to the naked eye if a Martian astronaut were to look to the sky from one of the two poles.
Today, NASA is performing a new test round for its low-density supersonic decelerator (LDSD), which is basically a giant stop and break system for heavy duty crafts landing on Mars. Both the Curiosity Rover (2012) and the twin Viking probes (1976) used the same parachute to slow their supersonic descent and land safely on the Martian surface. These parachutes, however, can't handle more than a tone worth of payload, and if humans are ever to touch the planet's surface they'd need to land 15 to 20 tones of payload. The LDSD system deployed by NASA and slated for a test run above the Pacific might be the technology we've been waiting for.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced on Monday its strategic framework for a newly established space agency, and also the first academic space program in the federation. The Space Research Center will be the first of its kind in the Middle East, as will be a graduate degree program in Advanced Space Science at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology and Orbital ATK Inc. What's the federation's end game, though? Last year, UAE announced it will launch an orbiting probe around Mars in 2020. Is it all about scientific missions or, like Dubai's towering skyscrapers, merely a show of force, of grandeur? Apparently, it's part science, part showoff, part money. It's hard to tell at this point which weighed more when UAE first considered its new space agency and subsequent missions.
An innovative concept might allow engineers to send probes on Mars in previously inaccessible locations. The project, called MARSDROP, would send two landers to the Red Planet, where they would detach from the shuttle and glide down to the planetary surface.
