Mars

For over a year, NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover has been investigating the clay-bearing unit in the Gale Crater. Now the intrepid explorer is on the move, starting a summer-long journey to a higher part of Mount Sharp dubbed the "sulfate-bearing unit."

ESA has awarded a contract to Airbus Defence and Space to go ahead on the next phase to develop the Sample Fetch Rover. The contract will allow Airbus to continue work on the rover that will collect Martian rock and soil samples for return to Earth.

Turns out the Red Planet is a little more green than we thought. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has detected a tinge of green in the atmosphere, making it the first time this aurora-like glow has been spotted around a planet other than Earth.

The Martian landscape is dotted with evidence of ancient fluid flows. But were they caused by lava or mud? Experiments in chambers simulating Mars conditions have now shown that mud volcanoes could be responsible for some formations.

An international team of scientists is conducting the experiments designed for NASA's Perseverance Mars rover here on Earth. The purpose is to provide a baseline with which to compare the data returned from the Red Planet.

The Mars Helicopter drone may be scheduled to launch soon, but it's still just a single aircraft that will be useless if it conks out. With that in mind, scientists are now looking into an alternative – fleets of tiny, cheap "Nanocardboard Flyers."

Scientists have developed a biohybrid reactor that can take carbon dioxide and turn it into versatile organic compounds, using bacteria and a forest of nanowires to make these conversions with what they claim is record efficiency.

NASA is continuing to prepare its freshly named Mars 2020 rover for launch later this year, with the team successfully attaching the sampling components that Perseverance will use to collect Martian rock and dust after touchdown.

Europe's ExoMars mission has suffered a setback and will not launch until 2022. The mission has been pushed back from its 2020 launch date due to the need for further component testing and the disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Organic compounds have been discovered on Mars in recent years. A new study examines the different ways that one type in particular, thiophene, may have formed, and intriguingly one of the most plausible scenarios involves ancient microbial life.

NASA's Mars 2020 rover finally has a name: Perseverance. The result of a nationwide "Name the Rover" essay contest, the winning moniker was submitted by 13-year-old Alexander Mather of Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia.

NASA has used Curiosity's cameras to capture many images of Mars since touching down on the Red Planet, but none quite as detailed as this, a new panorama showing the rugged Martian landscape through a grand total of 1.8 billion pixels.