Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered opal on Mars. The deposits may prove to be valuable to future Martian explorers not as jewelry but as a potential source of water.

It may look like a lightsaber sitting on the surface of Mars, but this titanium tube is a sample canister dropped off by Perseverance. This could eventually be the first pristine sample of Martian soil and rock returned to Earth in a future mission.

After over four years on Mars, NASA's InSight lander has been declared dead. Mission Control was unable to reestablish contact with the robotic spacecraft on two consecutive attempts, showing that the batteries are exhausted.

Dust devils are a common occurrence on Mars, but Perseverance has now captured one from up close for the first time. The NASA rover recorded video from right inside the dust devil, as well as the first audio of the phenomenon on the Red Planet.

NASA’s InSight has detected the strongest and longest quake on Mars so far. The event was five times more powerful than any previous marsquake, unleashing as much energy as all others combined. With the lander failing the record is unlikely to topple.

Ever since taking off on its historic first flight last year, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has been single-handedly raising the bar for the Red Planet’s aviation scene, and has now soared to its greatest heights yet.

Mars is usually considered a geologically dead planet, but a new study challenges that idea. Multiple lines of evidence reveals a giant plume of magma is forcing its way up through the mantle and producing seismic activity in one region of the surface.

NASA’s InSight Mars lander has made two major new discoveries. By sensing seismic activity from the Red Planet, the craft has now detected a large meteorite impact, and found evidence of magma pools and volcanic activity still occurring today.

With a daring plan to collect samples from the surface of Mars in the pipeline, NASA engineers are starting to move the necessary pieces into place here on Earth, which includes firing hyper velocity bullets at its experimental shield materials.

Humans might not be the first lifeforms to face self-induced climate change. A new model suggests Mars was once habitable enough to support microbes, and they may have wiped themselves out by causing irreparable damage to the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

New evidence has emerged in the debate about whether there’s liquid water on Mars. In a study led by the University of Cambridge, scientists examined the topology of Martian ice sheets and found signatures that match subglacial lakes here on Earth.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured some incredible imagery since landing on the Red Planet early last year, but none as detailed as its latest effort, a stunning mosaic made up of more than 1,000 separate images.