NASA has two interactive tools that enable the public to follow its Mars Perseverance rover as it makes its way around the Red Planet. One of the tools is designed to follow the rover "as though you were standing on the surface of Mars," according to the space agency, while the other tool shows Perseverance and Ingenuity's current location and the stops from their past journeys.
NASA has announced the details for its next annual Human Exploration Rover Challenge. The competition's registration is now open to student teams located in the US, giving budding engineers and designers the chance to build their own lightweight rover and demonstration its suitability for exploring other worlds. Some of the teams may win awards for their work.
A few days after announcing that the Perseverance rover's second sample collection effort was a success, NASA has shared images of the actual sample within the titanium tube where it is stored. The sample image was made possible using a camera on the rover called the Sampling and Caching System Camera, confirming that a tiny piece of Mars has been fully and completely stored.
NASA has updated its Perseverance rock sampling plans, revealing the process it will initiate in the coming days as it determines where to drill next for a core sample. The news comes only a couple of weeks after the first drill sampling attempt failed, an issue believed to have been caused by rock composition that differed from what experts had expected.
NASA's Perseverance rover has left its landing site and is officially starting its scientific mission, according to the space agency. Until June 1, which is when the rover left the Octavia E. Butler landing site, NASA's Perseverance team spent their time testing the rover's various systems and using the rover as part of its Ingenuity helicopter test flights.
Recently China became only the second nation on the planet to land a rover on Mars. The six-wheeled rover is powered by solar energy and rolled off the ramp from the lander and onto the surface of Mars at 10:40 AM Beijing time on Saturday. Zhurong is significantly smaller than the Rovers NASA is operating on Mars, weighing 240 kilograms.
The Zhurong rover returned its first photos from Mars this week, marking another first for China. China is now the second nation on our planet Earth to land a craft on Mars and keep said probe operational for a period long enough to snap some photos. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) released video of the release of the craft from China's orbiter before landing as well as photos from the landed craft this week.
NASA has announced a big achievement involving its Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February: it has successfully converted some of the Martian atmosphere to oxygen. This accomplishment, NASA explains, could pave the way for oxygen storage on Mars, as well as a more futuristic scenario involving generating oxygen for astronauts to breathe.
As NASA had previously detailed, the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in mid-February, is equipped with a system called the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). This tool is designed to gather local 'weather reports' from the Perseverance rover's location in the Jezero Crater, then send the data back to people on Earth. This week marked the first delivery of such a report.
Did you know that pieces of the original history-making Wright Brothers' "1903 Wright Flyer I" have orbited the Earth and been to moon? Now, NASA collaborated with Carillon Historical Park and the Wright Brothers National Museum to send another piece of the flyer to Mars to take part in another of humanity's historical achievements. The Perseverance rover rolls on Mars now, holding the helicopter craft Ingenuity, onboard which is a piece of the Wright Flyer I's wing fabric.
NASA has announced its plans regarding the small Ingenuity Mars Helicopter that arrived on the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover. According to the space agency, it plans to power on and deploy the helicopter for the first time sometime after April 8, 2021, marking the first attempt to operate an aircraft on another planet.
NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February, is equipped with microphones that, the space agency had said, would enable it to capture noises as it navigated the planet. Only weeks after the landing, NASA is back with the first-ever audio clip of a machine operating on another planet, giving the public a full 16 minutes of raw, unfiltered audio.