NASA has announced that as part of its final assembly of the Perseverance rover, its team has installed the parachute, off-road wheels, and air brakes. The wheels are machined from flight-grade aluminum, according to NASA, which used titanium for the spokes. The parachute, meanwhile, will be used to slow down the rover on its descent to the Red Planet's surface when it arrives early next year.
NASA ran the "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign inviting people from around the world to submit their names to hitch a ride to Mars aboard the new Perseverance Rover. Nearly 11 million people submitted their names, and all the names were stenciled by an electron beam onto a trio of fingernail-sized silicon chips. Also stenciled on the chips were essays from 155 finalists in NASA's "Name the Rover" contest.
Last week at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA wrapped up what it says was 'important testing' involving the small helicopter that will be shipped with its Perseverance Mars rover next year. This was the last time the helicopter's rotor blades will spin until the vehicle arrives on the Martian surface, where NASA hopes to operate the first-ever aircraft on a planet other than Earth.
NASA's Orion spacecraft has held up to huge extremes of temperature and more, acing its testing at one of the US space agency's most impressive facilities, as the capsule prepares to head to the Moon. The test process took four months, a vital safety precaution ahead of the Artemis I mission. Success there paves the way for NASA's manned mission to Mars.
NASA has shared an incredible new Curiosity rover selfie that marks its latest record-breaking activity on Mars. According to the space agency, Curiosity recently -- and quite successfully -- trekked up an incredibly steep part of the Martian landscape called the Greenheugh Pediment. The rover paused only to capture a selfie to commemorate the moment, one that features the entire rover and quite a bit of red landscape.
NASA set to launch the next rover that will cruise the surface of Mars and gather data and information for scientists back on Earth. The rover is called the Mars Perseverance Rover, and its launch window opens in a little less than four months. The rover is a six-wheeled device, and NASA says that it is reaching significant pre-launch milestones almost daily.
The European Space Agency has announced that its ExoMars mission has been postponed until 2022. The decision was made based on recommendations from a team tasked with determining what all still needs to be done in order to get launch authorization. Put simply, more time is needed to complete all of the tests necessary for the Mars spacecraft to be launched.
Among the rabble of COVID-19 panic articles in the news today, the ESA's announcement of a set date for Mars travel almost seems like satire. The date announcement is actually a postponement of a previously announced date for the ESA's next journey to Mars. This is the second mission window for the next launch of the ESA's ExoMars mission, a mission that's already in progress.
The curiosity rover found something that some researchers believe is consistent with the presence of early life on Mars. What the rover found was a compound called thiophene, an organic compound found on Earth in coal, crude oil, and white truffles. Thiophenes were discovered on Mars, and a researcher from Washington State University called Dirk Schulze-Makuch believes that the presence of the substance on Mars is consistent with the presence of early life on the Red Planet.
As first promised earlier this week, NASA has officially announced the name for the rover it has thus far referred to as 'Mars 2020.' Going forward -- and in keeping with the trend established by its past Martian rovers -- this new rover is named 'Perseverance,' and it'll launch for the Red Planet later this year. The winner of the rover naming contest was a middle school student from Virginia.
NASA has shared the highest-resolution panoramic image ever captured by its Curiosity Mars rover. At 1.8 billion pixels, this panorama provides an unprecedented look across the Martian surface, revealing regions that include the rim of the Gale Crater in which Curiosity is located, as well as the Slangpos Crater, the Vera Rubin Ridge, Upper Mount Sharpe, the Central Butte, and more.
Later this week, NASA will conduct a live event during which it will announce the official name of the Mars rover that will launch later this year. Until now, NASA has referred to this machine as the Mars 2020 rover, but we've known for quite a while that this is only a temporary placeholder. The space agency recently held a contest in which it invited students in the US to contribute name suggestions.