The Perseverance rover has met its ride to Mars, with NASA mounting the roving science experiment to the Atlas V rocket that will eventually take it to the red planet. While the launch isn't for some weeks yet, Perseverance is already safely encased in the protective nose cone that will shield it during its fiery blast-off.
The summer NASA plans to launch the Mars Perseverance Rover to Mars as part of the Mars 2020 Mission. Perseverance is packed with equipment intended to search for signs of life on Mars at some point in the distant past. One of the tools on the rover is called the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminance for Organics & Chemicals or SHERLOC. That instrument will search for chemicals on the Martian surface linked to life.
Weeks after performing a risky workaround maneuver to get its InSight rover 'mole' tool working, NASA has offered an update on the plan -- it will soon remove its scoop to get a closer look at the instrument. The space agency published a new short animation made from individual still images that shows off Martian dirt as its vibrates out of the mole's burrowing hole.
NASA has announced that its Mars Curiosity rover has started its 'summer trip' on the Red Planet, kicking things off with a new panorama featuring the Greenheugh Pediment. During its road trip, NASA says the rover will cover around one mile of the Martian surface, ending back at a tall mountain called Mount Sharp that it has been exploring for several years.
NASA is remembering one of its most notable July 4th events: the arrival of its Sojourner on Mars in 1997. Depending on your age, you may not be familiar with Sojourner, having instead learned about Curiosity, the now-defunct Opportunity, and perhaps even the Spirit rover, which was active on the Red Planet from 2004 to 2010. Lesser known is the space agency's Sojourner, a rover that paved the way for NASA's latest and greatest Mars missions.
One of the coolest things that NASA will put on the surface of Mars is hitching a ride along with the Perseverance rover. It is called the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. The goal of the Ingenuity helicopter is to prove that controlled flight can happen on the surface of another planet. One of the most challenging parts of the journey for the helicopter will be the very final stage where it's deployed on the surface of the Red Planet.
The deadline for NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 mission to launch is fast-approaching - and the US space agency isn't accepting the possibility of delay or defeat. In the pipeline for eight years now, Mars 2020 isn't short on challenges - including a parachute to land on the red planet's surface, a brand new experimental helicopter, and a whole new rover design - but the biggest is arguably the relation of Earth to NASA's destination.
Every now again the team operating the Curiosity Mars rover that's cruising the surface of the Red Planet stops to take the opportunity to do a little stargazing. When looking at the skies from Earth, we can often see Mars and other planets in the nighttime sky. Curiosity is able to do the same thing on the surface of Mars.
The ESA has a spacecraft in orbit around Mars called the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. Around the Red Planet, a phenomenon previously only seen around the Earth has been discovered by ExoMars. The green glow is a phenomenon caused by oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, glowing oxygen is produced during polar auroras when energetic electrons from interplanetary space collide with the upper atmosphere.
NASA has equipped its Mars rover Perseverance with two tools named after a popular fictional duo. Called "Sherloc" and Watson, each tool is part of a system that will enable NASA to investigate Mars rocks as small as a grain of sand. Sherloc is located on the rover's robotic arm; it includes a laser and spectrometers that work alongside the Watson camera.
The NASA Curiosity Rover has been exploring Mars for many years. One of the key experiments that the rover has been conducting is a multi-year experiment happening in the chemistry lab inside the rover's belly called the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM). Scientists have used the results of that test to make insights into answering some of the biggest questions about Mars, such as are there organic compounds, if the planet had liquid water, and could it have supported life in the distant past.
The Martian surface is covered with thousands of lava-like flows similar to the kind we see from volcanoes on Earth. Questions have remained over what these flows are made of -- were they the result of lava or something else entirely? A new study out of Lancaster University has settled the question, pointing to massive floods that happened in Mars' distant past.