Mars

The question of whether life once existed on Mars may be answered by a new laser instrument from the University of Bern. The device can be carried by a rover to zap samples of the Red Planet to see if they contain traces of microfossils.

Next time you're driving around on Mars and need to get your tire replaced, chances are good it'll look something like a revolutionary new version made by NASA and Goodyear. The mesh cage design can take a beating and roll right on.

2024 has been a year in space that has seen successes, failures, a clutch of firsts, and some goodbyes – not to mention a long-distance probe rescue, spacesuits on the catwalk, and a couple of cosmic oddities. Let's have a look back.

Future space helicopters may benefit as NASA completes history's first interplanetary aircraft crash inquiry. The yet-to-be-released technical report explains why the space agency's Ingenuity Mars helicopter crashed on January 18, 2024.

Everybody from NASA to David Bowie has wondered if there’s life on Mars – and now we might have a precise place to look for it. A new Caltech study has shown that photosynthetic microbes could thrive in a small habitable zone beneath the ice.

Data from NASA's Curiosity rover collected on Mars is shedding new light on how the Red Planet became uninhabitable in the distant past due to a changing climate that caused the surface water to evaporate or be locked away as ice.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk says that the first of his company's Starship spacecraft will set off for Mars in two years and the first crewed missions will follow in 2028. He sees this as part of his plan to make humanity an interplanetary species.

The good news is that there's a vast ocean of water under the surface of Mars – enough to cover the entire planet to a depth of a mile (1.6 km). The bad news is that this repository is so deep and unreachable that it might as well be in another galaxy.

When you live on the Moon, your only option for commuting back to Earth or on to Mars will be some kind of rocket. But each launch will kick up a hellstorm of debris. Building walls to contain the mess could be a perfect job for autonomous rovers.

A lengthy trip to Mars, which exposes astronauts to a combination of cosmic radiation and weightlessness, could result in permanent kidney damage, according to a new study. It's the largest analysis to date on how spaceflight affects kidney health.

Sometimes the impossible turns out to be not so impossible. From satellite data, scientists have discovered frost forming on top of the tallest volcanic mountains in the solar system on Mars. The snag is that it shouldn't be there at all.

Abundant, diverse bacterial communities have been found deep beneath the almost uninhabitable surface of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The researchers who discovered them say they're likely 19,000 years old and could be linked to microbial life on Mars.