The six-wheeled explorer recently captured several Red Planet mini-twisters spinning on the rim of Jezero Crater. A Martian dust devil can be seen consuming a smaller one in this short video made of images taken by a navigation camera aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. These swirling, sometimes towering columns of air and dust are common … Read more
The rover carries several swatches of spacesuit materials, and scientists are assessing how they’ve held up after four years on the Red Planet. NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars in 2021 to search for signs of ancient microbial life and to help scientists understand the planet’s climate and geography. But another key objective is to … Read more
Researchers analyzing pulverized rock onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover have found the largest organic compounds on the Red Planet to date. The finding, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests prebiotic chemistry may have advanced further on Mars than previously observed. Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity’s Sample Analysis … Read more
A new international study partially funded by NASA on how Mars got its iconic red color adds to evidence that Mars had a cool but wet and potentially habitable climate in its ancient past. The current atmosphere of Mars is too cold and thin to support liquid water, an essential ingredient for life, on its … Read more
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this feather-shaped iridescent cloud just after sunset on Jan. 27, 2023. Studying the colors in iridescent clouds tells scientists something about particle size within the clouds and how they grow over time. These clouds were captured as part of a seasonal imaging campaign to study noctilucent, or “night-shining” clouds. A … Read more
While the Martian clouds may look like the kind seen in Earth’s skies, they include frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Red-and-green-tinted clouds drift through the Martian sky in a new set of images captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover using its Mastcam — its main set of “eyes.” Taken over 16 minutes on Jan. 17 … Read more
With help from AI, scientists discovered a fresh crater made by an impact that shook material as deep as the Red Planet’s mantle. Meteoroids striking Mars produce seismic signals that can reach deeper into the planet than previously known. That’s the finding of a pair of new papers comparing marsquake data collected by NASA’s InSight … Read more
Mars has fascinated humanity for centuries, with its earliest recorded observations dating back to the Bronze Age. By the 17th century, astronomers were able to identify features of the Martian surface, such as its ice caps and darker regions. Since the 1960s, exploration of the Red Planet has intensified with robotic missions from various space … Read more
It’s a new year on Mars, and while New Year’s means winter in Earth’s northern hemisphere, it’s the start of spring in the same region of the Red Planet. And that means ice is thawing, leading to all sorts of interesting things. JPL research scientist Serina Diniega explains. NASA/JPL-Caltech Instead of a winter wonderland, the … Read more
New images taken from space show how dust on and around InSight is changing over time — information that can help scientists learn more about the Red Planet. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) caught a glimpse of the agency’s retired InSight lander recently, documenting the accumulation of dust on the spacecraft’s solar panels. In the … Read more