Mars, Red Planet | featured news

Mars Rover Shows Planet Could Have Supported Life

Martian Rock Sample

NASA scientists say tests on a Mars rock show the planet could have supported primitive life. The analysis was done by the rover Curiosity, which drilled into the rock, crushed it and tested a tiny sample. The rover was the first spacecraft sent to Mars that could collect a sample from deep inside a rock.

 

Reality TV for the Red Planet

Mars Reality Show

A Dutch entrepreneur's financial plan for a colony on Mars is based on selling the television rights to cover the project every step of the way.

 

Mars rover touches first rock, then takes off

Martian Rock

NASA's Curiosity rover reached out and touched a Martian rock with its huge robotic arm for the first time, then took off on its longest Red Planet drive to date. Curiosity spent the past several days investigating a strange pyramid-shaped stone named "Jake Matijevic," testing out some of the gear at the end of its 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm. These tools include the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, or APXS, which measures elemental composition; and the Mars Hand Lens Imager close-up camera, or MAHLI.

 

Rover offers Mars weather forecast: Pink skies, dust storms

Mars Weather

NASA's rover carries a sophisticated weather station offering data on the Red Planet's environment that astronauts might one day encounter.

 

Mars rover is a robot geologist with a lab in its belly

The rover Curiosity, nearing Mars, has sophisticated tools to help answer the question: Did the Red Planet ever sustain life — and could it today? In a matter of days, a geologist unlike any on Earth will venture into alien territory.

 

NASA rover reaches rim of big Martian crater

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....

 

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