Five months after landing on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is gearing up to collect its first core sample next month, mission managers said Wednesday. It will drill out a lipstick-size bit of rock from the floor of an ancient lakebed where the remnants of past microbial life might be preserved. […]
Mars
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Perseverance looks back at its wheel tracks. The robot is a self-driving vehicle The US space agency’s Perseverance rover is getting ready to take its first sample of Mars rock. The core, about the size of a finger, will be packaged in a sealed tube for eventual return to Earth. […]
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has begun its hunt for evidence of ancient microbial life. The spacecraft, which landed on the red planet in February, has tested an array of instruments on its 7-foot robotic arm. In a Monday release, NASA said that Perseverance had commenced its probe of Martian rocks and sediment, testing detectors and capturing its first science readings. The rover […]
NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has sent pictures back to Earth of a unique rock formation within what the space agency called an “ancient lakebed” in its latest reported discovery during it mission on the Red Planet. “Check out this patch of rock I found: looks kind of like garden pavers, and […]
HELSINKI — China’s Zhurong rover has approached and imaged the parachute and backshell which helped the vehicle land safely on Mars. The 240-kilogram solar-powered Zhurong captured the image of the discarded items on July 12 Beijing time at a distance of 30 meters away. Zhurong landed on Mars May 14 […]
By Jonathan O’Callaghan NASA’s Curiosity rover NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS An unknown source may be producing methane close to NASA’s Curiosity rover, with potential implications for life on Mars. Since Curiosity landed in Gale crater on Mars in 2012, it has used an instrument called the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) to measure the […]
A NASA composite photo created from more than 100 images of Mars taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s. AP Mars and Venus are about to line up in the night sky, getting so close on Monday and Tuesday that they’ll almost seem to touch. An astronomical event in which […]
In the hunt for life outside Earth, Mars is old news. “I think I’d rate Enceladus now over Europa, and there were people who were saying Europa was a better prospect than Mars,” said Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer of the SETI Institute, a nonprofit near San Francisco that specializes […]