Mars | featured news

Russian scientists were racing against the clock Wednesday to find a way to fire the engines of an unmanned probe destined to collect soil samples from a moon of Mars, after equipment failure shortly after launch left it stuck in Earth orbit....

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The end of a 520-day simulated space mission marks one more step in a succession of make-believe trips to Mars, leading up to the real thing.

The first rock a NASA rover looked at when it arrived at a crater on Mars was unlike any looked at on the planet before, scientists said... And the first rock it looked at has already opened a new chapter in the study of Mars, NASA scientists said Thursday. On a telephone news conference, mission scientists giddily described that rock: full of zinc and bromine, elements that, at least for rocks on Earth, would be suggestive of geology formed with heat and water.

Scientists have found Earth's oldest fossils in Australia and say their microscopic discovery is convincing evidence that cells and bacteria were able to thrive in an oxygen-free world more than 3.4 billion years ago.

NASA's surviving Mars rover Opportunity has reached the rim of a 14-mile-wide crater where the robot geologist will examine rocks older than any it has seen in its seven years on the surface of the red planet, scientists said Wednesday....

NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Saturday became the first probe ever to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

US and European efforts to send joint missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018 are slowed by an inability on the part of the Americans to provide a full financial commitment to the projects.

Think Mars today is a hostile place? It was worse 600,000 years ago, according to new research that suggests the planet had a dustier, stormier atmosphere. “It was an unpleasant place to hang out,” said lead researcher Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute. He said Mars’ climate was probably a lot like the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s — but a lot worse.

The crew of a simulated international Mars mission took their first steps on an indoor Red Planet landscape on Monday, marking the halfway point in an ambitious 520-day isolation experiment to test the strains of interplanetary travel.

NASA's next-generation rover mission to the surface of Mars needs more money – again. Nine months before the scheduled launch, the space agency says the mission has burned through its reserves and needs another $82 million to complete testing before liftoff.