The Perseverance rover has been toiling on the Martian surface for over three years, collecting rock samples that will eventually be brought to Earth if all goes according to plan. But the rover has also picked up hitchhikers, in the form of traces of Martian atmosphere that are squeezed into the “headspace” of the…
For more than five years, a pair of spacecraft have been traveling through the solar system to reach the innermost planet Mercury and observe its extreme conditions. During its complex journey, the BepiColombo mission ran into a problem that’s preventing its thrusters from operating at full power, potentially…
For more than 45 years, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been cruising through the cosmos, crossing the boundary of our solar system to become the first human-made object to venture to interstellar space.
NASA is scaling back on its ambitious Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, fearing federal budget cuts to the space agency’s plan to bring back rock and dust from the Red Planet, which has come under heavy scrutiny for having unrealistic costs and timelines.
NASA, in its relentless pursuit of space innovation, announced on Thursday the selection of 13 new projects for its 2024 Phase I awards under the Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. These awards, totaling up to $175,000 each, are granted to teams proposing advanced and unconventional space technologies.
NASA just put its new propulsion system to the test, powering a 3D-printed rotating detonation rocket engine for a sustained burn that lasted three times as long as the first test.
For centuries, astronomers were limited to ground-based observations of the planets, but now we use spacecraft to capture close-up views of our neighboring worlds. Excitingly, our views of solar system planets have been getting progressively better over the decades, as these images attest.
Six California lawmakers wrote to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson last week to oppose the agency’s recent cuts to the Mars Sample Return mission, which aims to bring samples collected by the Perseverance rover on Mars to Earth.
NASA is pulling back from its Mars Sample Return program (MSR) in order to develop a revised way of bringing the Martian rocks back to Earth after its original plan was deemed unrealistic.
NASA is considering alternative ways to bring back samples from Mars after its budget and schedule for the sample return mission was deemed unrealistic in a recent report by an independent review board.
