Perseverance beams back incredible video of landing on Mars
New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 as the spacecraft plummeted, parachuted, and rocketed toward the surface of Mars. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds …
New NASA Posters Feature Cosmic Frights for Halloween
Depicting some of the Universe’s most mysterious astronomical phenomena with artistic flairs, NASA has released its latest Galaxy of Horrors posters just in time for Halloween. Presented in the style of vintage horror movie advertisements, the new posters feature a dead galaxy, an explosive gamma ray burst caused by colliding stellar corpses, and ever-elusive dark matter. …
Twin spacecraft to study “rubble pile” binary asteroids
The official go-ahead has been given by NASA to a mission to launch a pair of small spacecraft to capture the first-ever closeup look at a mysterious class of solar system objects: binary asteroids. These bodies are pairs of asteroids that orbit around each other in space, much like the Earth and Moon. In a project …
Gazing upon Mars
Throughout our exclusive Mars 2020 Exploration Mission Guide, we included a number of images of Mars captured by the plethora of orbiters, landers and rovers that the nations of Earth have sent to study the planet. Here we are including a large selection of those images. Many of the images are false-color or otherwise enhanced …
Building for Mars
The planning and construction of a new space mission is a multi-year process by both the space agency itself and a large number of other contractors working on the spacecraft’s hardware and software, to the rocket launching the interplanetary probe toward its target. Here we’ve assembled a gallery of the Mars 2020 rover and helicopter throughout …
Mars Exploration Historical Timeline
1960s MARSNIK 1 Failure USSR • Oct. 10, 1960 • Flyby Did not reach Earth orbit. MARSNIK 2 Failure USSR • Oct. 14, 1960 • Flyby Did not reach Earth orbit. SPUTNIK 22 Failure USSR • Oct. 24, 1962 • Flyby Achieved Earth orbit only. MARS 1 Failure USSR • Nov. 1, 1962 • Flyby …