Results tagged “Mars”

With First Martian Samples Packed, Perseverance Initiates Remarkable Sample Return Mission NASA, along with the European Space Agency, is developing a campaign to return the Martian samples to Earth.

Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake.

A new report that could make it simpler to send spacecraft to some areas of Mars while still protecting the planet from Earth-based contamination was presented today at a press conference at the 53rd annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Amanda Hendrix.

Water is essential for life on Earth and other planets, and scientists have found ample evidence of water in Mars' early history.

A combination of a once-debunked 19th-century identification of a water-carrying iron mineral and the fact that these rocks are extremely common on Earth, suggests the existence of a substantial water reservoir on Mars, according to a team of geoscientists.

A new analysis of data from ESA's Mars Express mission has revealed that our knowledge of the way these atmospheric gases interact with each other is incomplete.

A team at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London is paving the way for future rovers to search for meteorites on Mars. The scientists are using the NHM's extensive meteorite collection to test the spectral instruments destined for the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, and develop tools to identify meteorites on the surface of the red planet.

Searching for biomarkers on Mars is a primary goal of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has begun its search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

ExoFit trials are field campaigns financed by ESA to test the Rosalind Franklin rover and to enhance collaboration practices between ExoMars working groups. During the first trial, a replicate of the ExoMars rover was remotely operated from Oxfordshire (United Kingdom) to perform a complex sequence of scientific operation at the Tabernas Desert (Spain).

Reports of methane detections at Mars have captivated scientists and non-scientists alike. On Earth, a significant amount of methane is produced by microbes that help most livestock digest plants. This digestion process ends with livestock exhaling or burping the gas into the air.

The ion escape of Mars' CO2 atmosphere caused by its dissociation products C and O atoms is simulated from present time to ≈4.1 billion years ago (Ga) by numerical models of the upper atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind.

A NASA team has found that organic salts are likely present on Mars. Like shards of ancient pottery, these salts are the chemical remnants of organic compounds, such as those previously detected by NASA's Curiosity rover.

Martian subsurface habitability and astrobiology can be evaluated via a lava tube cave, without drilling. MACIE addresses two key goals of the Decadal Survey (2013-2022) and three MEPAG goals.

Evidence of recent volcanic activity on Mars shows that eruptions could have taken place within the past 50,000 years, a paper by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist David Horvath says.

One of the great mysteries of modern space science is neatly summed up by the view from NASA's Perseverance, which just landed on Mars: Today it's a desert planet, and yet the rover is sitting right next to an ancient river delta.

As NASA's Perseverance rover begins its search for ancient life on the surface of Mars, a new study suggests that the Martian subsurface might be a good place to look for possible present-day life on the Red Planet.

Understanding whether Mars was once able to support life has been a major driving force for Mars research over the past 50 years.

Mars today has no active volcanism and its atmosphere is oxidizing, dominated by the photochemistry of CO2 and H2O. Using a one-dimensional photochemical model, we consider whether plausible volcanic gas fluxes could have switched the redox-state of the past martian atmosphere to reducing conditions.

The new science results indicate that a large quantity of the Red Planet's water is trapped in its crust rather than having escaped into space.