NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is sizing up its next dig site on the Red Planet.

The Curiosity team will characterize the surface composition of the Mars site, informally named "Nazca," as thoroughly as possible before drilling into it.

What is it?

Curiosity snapped the close-up image on Oct. 18, 2026, using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). The image shows multiple roughly disk-shaped potential crystal formations at the rover's next drill target.

MAHLI is located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm. It uses an onboard focusing process to make a composite of images of the same target acquired at different positions to focus on multiple features in a single image.

Why is it incredible?

Scientists theorize that the "discs and needles" texture takes its characteristic shape as crystals, or "crystal forms," grow.

The relatively large sizes of the crystal forms at "Nazca" may provide clues about the temperatures at which they grew, as well as information about the abundance of salts and fluids in the area at the time. Complicating this picture, however, is the fact that mineral crystals can be replaced by other minerals after their original crystallization. The new minerals are known as "pseudomorphs," because they have the same shape as the original minerals but not the same composition or molecular structure.

The Curiosity team will characterize the surface composition of Nazca — which shares its name with an ancient South American civilization that's famous for the large designs it etched into the rock and dirt — before drilling begins. The NASA researchers will then be able to compare the deeper composition to the surface-level composition.

Twin NASA spacecraft are wrapping up a year-long escapade, ready to make a beeline to the Red Planet.

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) spacecraft launched in November 2025 on the second-ever flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. But rather than head straight to Mars, the two spacecraft dawdled through a looping trajectory. Now, they are back in Earth's neighborhood where they tackled a crucial engine burn unusually close to Earth that — if all goes well — will set them on track for Mars.

"No NASA mission has ever done this before," said Rob Lillis, a planetary and space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and principal investigator of the ESCAPADE mission. "For most missions, it just isn't necessary."

That's because traditionally NASA's Mars missions have been carefully choreographed within cosmic launch constraints, leaving Earth during a brief window of planetary alignment that only occurs every 26 months. ESCAPADE was meant to launch in October 2024, when Earth and Mars were favorably aligned, but delays with the New Glenn rocket forced the mission to sit out the precious launch window.

Rather than wait to launch this fall, NASA decided to try something new. ESCAPADE mission planners designed a "loitering" orbit, shaped like a kidney bean. It called for the twin probes to loop through that trajectory to be back at Earth in early November 2026, ready to continue on to Mars.

Once they arrived, however, the twin probes faced a major hurdle: Each had to perfectly execute an engine burn within Earth's gravity well. The maneuver is similar to the slingshot flybys that spacecraft regularly conduct to adjust their trajectories — but here, the probes had to fire their engines to amp up the effect of the burn rather than acting alone.

The first spacecraft tackled the feat on Nov. 7; the second did so on Monday (Nov. 9). And according to NASA, the burns went perfectly. "This is the first time NASA has used a powered Earth flyby to propel a spacecraft toward Mars, and we've now executed this maneuver twice, flawlessly, in just two days," Asal Naseri, acting associate flight director for NASA's Heliophysics Division said in a statement.

After just a few minor course corrections, ESCAPADE will be sailing toward a September 2027 Mars arrival.

A scenic detour

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft have made the most of their extended tour. Each spacecraft is about the size of two refrigerators and equipped with three scientific instruments and a couple cameras. All are tailored for studying the strange magnetic field of Mars, which is created both globally by charged particles from the sun interacting with the atmosphere and locally by areas of highly magnetic crust.

Earth's magnetic field is much stronger and generated by the planet's core. But it too is affected by the solar wind, as scientists call the constant stream of charged particles flowing off the sun and across space. On the side of Earth opposite the sun, the solar wind stretches the magnetic field to form an elongated tail structure, like a terrestrial windsock.

A range of missions have studied this magnetotail at various points up to nearly 800,000 miles (1.27 million kilometers) away from Earth, but beyond that, it has been a mystery. Conveniently, the two ESCAPADE spacecraft traveled through the structure over the course of about 10 days early last year at a much greater distance from Earth — some 1.19 million miles (1.91 million km) away.

"We were able to capture the magnetic field structure of that distant tail, how it flaps, how it moves, how the plasma flows within it," Lillis said, gathering data that he called "unprecedented." "And not only that but for the first time, we were able to do that with two spacecraft simultaneously."

A second shot at the magnetotail came over the summer, when the spacecraft were much closer to Earth but the moon was also passing through the magnetic structure. The two ESCAPADE spacecraft were able to partner with twin ARTEMIS-THEMIS spacecraft at the moon to observe the structure from four different perspectives simultaneously.

That's a huge boon when trying to study the magnetotail and its intricate and ever-changing magnetic field lines and plasma, Lillis said. "These are generally not things you can measure remotely," he said. "You kind of have to be there."

Jupiter and Mars will shine side by side in a spectacular close approach in the heart of the constellation Leo on Nov. 15. Here's what you need to know.

Mars and Jupiter reach their closest apparent separation in Earth's sky at 9:04 p.m. EST on Nov. 15 (0204 GMT on Nov. 16), according to astronomy website In-The-Sky. The planets will be below the horizon for U.S. stargazers at the moment of their closest approach, but observers can catch the pair rising above the eastern horizon around midnight local time, just a few hours later.

Remember: You can discover the exact timings for the rising and setting of the planets above your local horizon using Time and Date's night sky tracker.

Jupiter will be the brightest of the pair, when it rises a little over 1 degree from the red light of Mars — roughly the width of your little finger held at arm's length against the night sky. The bright star Regulus will glow close at hand, forming the dot of the backward question mark formation of stars that represents the head of the great Lion in the constellation Leo.

Mars and Jupiter will be close enough to share the field of view of a pair of 10x50 binoculars and will also make for a spectacular sight through the eyepiece of a telescope when viewed separately as they rise away from the horizon.

The gas giant's iconic Great Red Spot will rotate into view in the predawn hours of Nov. 16, and will be visible through a backyard telescope with an aperture of just 4 inches. Using a light green color filter will help increase the visibility of the vast storm, while an orange filter will help bring out detail in the gas giant's sweeping cloud belts.

The two planets will appear to gradually drift apart over the coming weeks and won't appear as close again for another 2.5 years in July 2029, when the two planets appear close together in the constellation Virgo.

Be sure to check out our guide to photographing the night sky, along with our picks of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography if you're interested in following the dance of the planets for yourself.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

A rose-colored rock discovered in the Sahara Desert may hold some clues to Mars' ancient geological history.

The meteorite, named Teghaza 001 after the salt plain in Mali where it was discovered in 2022, weighs roughly 1.8 pounds (800 grams) and formed more than 4.1 billion years ago. Blasted off Mars by an impact before eventually landing on Earth, it is one of the three oldest Martian meteorites ever found.

The extraordinary age and unusual mineral composition of Teghaza 001 offer a rare glimpse into the formation of Mars' early crust and how volcanic materials may have been altered by water, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

"It was only after we started looking closely that we realized this meteorite is really unique,” research leader Yang Liu of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said in the statement. "One of the paper’s reviewers called it a Rosetta Stone for Mars."

A Rosetta Stone for Mars

Unlike many Martian meteorites, Teghaza 001 contains a distinctive combination of igneous minerals and textures that preserve evidence of its complex history. Its mineral composition resembles materials observed in Mars' southern highlands by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Although researchers can’t pinpoint exactly where the meteorite originated on Mars, they have identified 13 potential locations on the planet where it may have formed.

"This is really our first piece of Martian crust from a part of Mars we’ve never had a sample of before," team member Lee Saper, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, said. "It records interactions of water and rock and maybe even an imprint of the Martian atmosphere as it was losing water."

The meteorite was initially identified as Martian based on its oxygen isotopes. To determine its age, scientists then examined tiny zircon crystals embedded in the rock. Using a specialized rubidium-strontium dating technique, researchers analyzed individual mineral grains on its surface, preserving it for future analysis.

The results revealed that Teghaza 001 was altered by water around 4.1 billion years ago, suggesting the rock itself formed even earlier. The mineral and chemical evidence points to a dynamic water cycle on ancient Mars, when liquid water interacted with the planet's crust and potentially left traces of its atmosphere as it gradually lost water.

Scientists believe further analysis of Teghaza 001 could reveal more about how water shaped the Martian surface and influenced the planet's evolution. The study also marks the first time researchers have used rubidium-strontium dating to analyze an ancient Martian meteorite, opening the door for the technique to be applied to other samples in the future.

"We've only scratched the surface," Liu concluded.

Their findings were published on Thursday (Oct. 29) in the journal Science. A separate study examining the meteorite's water content was published on June 10 in the journal Science Advances, offering additional insight into early Mars.

President Trump issued a declaration yesterday (Nov. 3), proclaiming space open to all humanity for exploration, and the right of American citizens to develop and settle the solar system according to United States laws.

"The American Declaration of Freedom in Space," describes space as the "province of all humans" and asserts that the United States will lead humanity's expansion into the cosmos. The proclamation reiterates the administration's goals with NASA's Artemis program to return American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and eventually sending astronauts to Mars, but introduces no new funding, programs or policy directives.

"Our Nation will lead the way in the exploration, development, use, and settlement of these new frontiers — forging an interplanetary civilization founded on the enduring and inalienable rights of freedom and individual liberty," the document says.

Trump invoked America's "frontier spirit," highlighting Apollo 11 astronauts as the first people in history to walk on the moon's surface and robotic rovers exploring Mars as examples of U.S. leadership, and emphasized the country's flourishing commercial space sector helping ensure "American space superiority for all eternity."

"The nation that leads in space will shape the future of humanity," the declaration says, and pledges that America will carry the values of faith, freedom and individual liberty into an interplanetary civilization.

The proclamation also highlights the success of NASA's Artemis II mission in April, which carried four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and set a record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. The follow-up to that mission, Artemis III, is scheduled to launch next summer (2027), and will test rendezvous and docking operations between NASA's Orion spacecraft and the program's two commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit.

Artemis IV will be the program's first lunar landing mission, and is targeted for 2028. A December 2025 executive order from the President reaffirmed the goal of meeting that timeline, as well as the deployment of the initial elements for a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.

Trump's declaration yesterday does not establish new NASA programs, allocate additional funding or issue instructions to federal agencies. Its sweeping language, though, does echo some of the principles in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which guarantees freedom of exploration while prohibiting national sovereignty claims on other planets.

Scientists have long suspected that Mars is geologically "dead," but new spacecraft observations suggest the Red Planet's volcanoes are merely sleeping.

That means that Olympus Mons, the extinct Martian volcano that at around 16 miles (26 kilometers) above the surrounding Martian plains is the largest mountain in the solar system, may in fact be a slumbering giant.

The observations were made with the European Space Agency (ESA) mission ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) as it studied volcanic fissures along the Alba Mons region of the Red Planet. Alba Mons is in the Tharsis region of Mars, the same area that is home to Olympus Mons. While the latter is the tallest volcano in the solar system, at 374 miles (600 km) across, about the size of Arizona, the Alba Mons region is the largest volcano when considering surface area.

TGO detected gas containing hydrogen chloride making its way to the surface of Mars through the Alba Mons fissures. The same gas is commonly found escaping from magmatic vents on Earth, with the compound coming from hot magma beneath the surface. Detecting it on Mars is a sign of dormant Martian volcanism.

Orbital imagery had previously shown some volcanoes appear to have been active within the last few million years, and seismometers have detected the rumbling of "marsquakes," both implying the Red Planet is volcanically active. However, eruptions and lava flows have been conspicuous by their absence.

"Our findings suggest that Mars has retained enough internal heat to support volcanic activity until recently, and possibly still does," team co-leader and scientist at the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Daniel Mège, said in a statement sent to Space.com via email. "The TGO was able to find the smoking gun. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack."

Evidence of dormant Martian volcanism is rising

Mège and colleagues were first alerted to something strange happening on Mars when they noticed spikes of hydrogen chloride during Martian summer and on the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet. That is both a time and place at which hydrogen chloride shouldn't be detected.

The gas usually peaks in the northern hemisphere during winter on Mars, disappearing in the summer. This variation is connected to the water and dust cycle on Mars. An exception to the rule occurs over volcanic fissures on the flanks of the Alba Mons volcano, in early summer.

The TGO followed up on this by detecting fresh and narrow fissures, in some cases hundreds of feet long, in the Alba Mons region. A clear sign of volcanism.

"It's truly amazing that it spotted a handful of molecules from a perhaps intermittent source, whilst moving continuously along its orbit to monitor the whole Martian atmosphere," Mège said.

The team thinks that these gases have been rising from the interior of Mars during the Martian winter, becoming blocked by ice. When this ice sublimates, changes directly from solid to gas, during summer, the gas is released, prompting spikes in hydrogen chloride seen by the TGO.

"Looking at the spatial distribution of the seeping, it became instantly obvious to me that there was something volcanic behind it, but it had to be demonstrated," said Mège. "A huge part of the work consisted of examining all the possible chemical processes going on in the Martian atmosphere.

"We needed to be rigorous, critical and creative to explain the presence of hydrogen chloride. The data were complex, but also excellent brain food."

Implications for life on Mars?

Mège and colleagues theorize that the gas is connected to "volcanic plumbing" in the form of a dormant magma chamber under the surface of Mars.

Regions like this could become hotspots (pun not intended) in the search for life on Mars. That is because magmatic gases like hydrogen chloride would have been more abundant in the past, creating a thicker Martian atmosphere and warmer climate.

Not only would this have led to liquid water covering much of the Martian surface, but when lava bubbled through the Martian crust and met groundwater, warm habitable niches ideal for microbial life could have been forged.

"Looking for Martian life in the seeping fissures of the Alba Mons region would make a lot of sense. If hydrothermal systems are active, they could contain the ingredients and energy needed for microorganisms to develop, and shield microorganisms from the hostile and changing environment above the surface," Mège concluded.

The team's research was published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday (Nov. 4).

This rainbow-hued rocky plain looks like the landscape of an alien world. And, it turns out, it is.

What is it?

In this image, we can see an ancient, rocky hill on Mars. In the Red Planet's Southern Highlands, this alien terrain is chock-full of minerals, which we can see clearly defined in this color-enhanced view of the region.

This image was snapped by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been studying the planet's surface, atmosphere and climate since arriving in Martian orbit in March 2006.

But this isn't exactly what the surface of the planet would look like through our eyes; the image is color-enhanced. Why would scientists take a natural-color image and turn it rainbow? Doing so enhances the slight color differences in these rocks, allowing researchers to pick out the different minerals.

Why is it incredible?

As pointed to above, enhancing colors in scientific images can be an incredibly useful tool for exploration.

For instance, in this image, the blue- and green-toned rocks could be full of minerals like pyroxenes and olivine, according to scientists analyzing the image. And they think that the yellow, orange and red patches may contain minerals formed by past interactions with liquid water.

By exploring the mineral content of rocks like this, researchers can peel back the layers of history within the Martian bedrock. The discovery of certain minerals, for example, can show that water flowed on Mars long ago, pointing to potentially habitable conditions.

So, as we can see, this striking rainbow image isn't just a beautiful landscape; it's also hiding serious clues to Mars' history.

The moon dives towards the glowing heart of the constellation Leo for a spectacular rendezvous with Mars and Jupiter overnight on Nov. 1-2, as the glittering stars of the Beehive Cluster shine nearby. Here's what you need to know.

Look to the eastern horizon an hour after midnight to see the 45%-lit waning moon shining less than 5 degrees from the red light of Mars — roughly the width of your three middle fingers held at arm's length to the night sky.

Jupiter's bright light will gleam just below the red planet, with the bright star Regulus lining up beyond to form a dazzling procession leading back to the horizon. The stars of the Beehive Cluster (M44) can be found twinkling 10 degrees from the unlit side of the lunar disk around this time, in the middle of the constellation Cancer.

Stargazers in Australia, Indonesia and a host of other island nations and territories will see the moon pass directly in front of Jupiter, hiding its light in an event known as an occultation starting at 3:45 p.m. EST (2045 GMT) on Nov. 2 , according to In-The-Sky.org. However, the exact visibility and timings depend on location.

The cosmic pile-up serves as a spectacular reminder of the scale and diversity of targets on display in the night sky. After all, the moon appears largest from our Earthly perspective, but in reality it's less than half the diameter of Mars.

Jupiter, meanwhile, is over 20 times wider than the red planet, while mighty Regulus is up to four times larger than the sun, andcould easily fit all the planets of the solar system in its vast expanse.

By moonrise on the night of Nov. 3, the lunar crescent will have leapt past Jupiter and Mars, to appear just 1 degree from the blue-white light of Regulus for viewers in the U.S. Meanwhile, viewers in several South American countries including Brazil, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia will see the moon occult Regulus beginning at 6:59 EST (1024 GMT) on Nov. 3. The exact timings for a selection of South American countries can be found below, courtesy of In-The-Sky.org.

Want to get a closer look at the moon and planets of the solar system? Then be sure to check out our picks of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the night sky, including the Celestron NexStar 8SE, which we rank as the best motorized telescope out there.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Our time on our "space mission" underwater was coming to an end, and I felt like what I imagine an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) must feel before returning to Earth. On one hand, you are excited to return to your home and loved ones, as well as to fresh food and normal hygiene. On the other, you know you will miss your crew and the incredible experience of being in space.

While my SEA STAR crew and I had not left Earth during our mission, we were separated from the surface of our home planet for five days. All we saw was a green alien water world surrounding us. We did this to live and work like astronauts on the ISS. Instead of dealing with the challenges of space that astronauts face, we problem-solved sometimes equally difficult issues that divers have to manage when performing research in sea water.

Our "wet ISS" was the Jules' Undersea Lab, which is located near Key Largo, Florida, at 22 feet (7 meters) underwater. By the end of our mission, we had all officially become aquanauts. An aquanaut is an undersea explorer who remains underwater for more than 24 hours, without returning to the surface, in a state known as saturation.

In this sense, saturation refers to the physiological condition achieved by a person who breathes underwater long enough for the body's tissues to absorb the maximum possible amount of inert gas (like nitrogen), for a specific depth and pressure. The term aquanaut derives from the Latin word "aqua" (water) and the Greek "nautes" (sailor).

There were a lot of things I wasn't going to miss about being an aquanaut. They included the constant loud noises our life support systems made to keep us alive underwater, as well as bathroom plumbing issues and some health concerns linked to living under pressure. We also had to be very careful when performing our "spacewalks" (scuba dives), due to the low visibility of the environment around us.

Nonetheless, I experienced a sort of "underview effect" during this mission. Most astronauts report experiencing an "overview effect" after seeing our whole planet from space, which usually makes them value our unique planet even more. I felt a similar thing when I saw the sun's rays come through the water. I couldn't reach them, but I enjoyed them from afar. My everyday life felt so close, yet so far away. It gave me both a feeling of longing and more determination to take even more care of our home world than before.

I'm grateful that we were able to perform all of the different scientific projects we planned for our mission. As the Commander of the crew, I usually have my work cut out for me managing the crew and overseeing their research projects, as had been the case for most of the 40 simulated space missions that I led previously. Fortunately, this time my crew was made up of experienced analog astronauts and divers, so the mission was mostly smooth sailing.

The research we chose for this mission was relevant for long-duration space missions. Since we can only send a small number of astronauts to the ISS with a limited number of research activities to perform, underwater stations provide us with a valuable way to conduct analog, or simulated, space missions instead. We also performed some environmental conservation work using a type of underwater vacuum device to help protect the nature around the Jules' Undersea Lab.

My scientific project was focused on studying whether our cognitive abilities and reaction times changed under pressure. This study is part of my collaboration with the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine, Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ostrava and City Hospital Ostrava in the Czech Republic. The whole crew definitely felt like their response times to these tests were slower during the mission than before it.

We were also interested in seeing how microgreens seeds were affected by the changes in pressure. Our Health & Safety Officer, Dr. Brandy Nunez, grew some of our kale and super salad mix before we started our mission, while other seeds started their growth journey underwater. All seeds were transferred to our underwater station using two varied pressure settings (gradual and sudden pressure release during their descent). After we harvested them, we could see that the latter types of seeds did indeed experience some barotrauma (damage caused by the sudden increase in air pressure).

Executive Officer Paul Bakken's work was related to managing the internal pressure of logistical transfer containers when they are exposed to significant environmental changes in pressure. The fourth crewmember, Mission Specialist Jenn Pint, worked with Interstellar Performance Labs to develop a taxonomy for analyzing environmental and crew interaction factors during simulated space missions.

On top of these projects, we also performed neutral buoyancy experiments during our underwater spacewalks, as well as the testing of environmental sensors developed by high school and university students in Slovakia. The sensors provided important supplemental information to the cognitive study about our simulated space habitat's living conditions.

Just like astronauts on the ISS, we dedicated some of our time to outreach and educational work, too. In our case, we called Cosmic Region, a simulated space station in Slovakia, and gave the team there a tour of our underwater habitat. My crewmembers kindly went into the water at that time and performed a spacewalk to show what our work during the mission was like.

As I put on my "spacesuit" (scuba diving gear) one last time, I breathed the stuffy undersea air once more and then dove out to return to "Earth." My crewmembers and I then took a long detour around the lagoon around us to help our bodies adjust to lower pressures. Even though we were only 22 feet underwater, there was still a small risk of decompression-related problems that aquanauts can face after living under saturation for some time. The final step was to breach the surface at long last. That's when we all enjoyed breathing fresh air again and feeling the sun on our faces, though the temperature in Florida made us quickly hide away from it again 😉.

You can follow Dr. Michaela Musilova at her website and on social media: @astro_michaela (Instagram, TikTok and Threads), @Dr. Michaela Musilova (Facebook) and @astro-michaela.bsky.social (Bluesky).

Living underwater was surprisingly peaceful. It was in many ways exactly what I imagine living on Mars would be like one day. There were no humans around us, except for my three SEA STAR crewmembers and me. Apart from the human noises we made, we couldn't hear anything other than the life support systems keeping us alive submerged 22 feet (7 meters) below the surface.

We were living in these extreme conditions to study the challenges astronauts may face on long-duration space missions. Since performing research in space is still rare and expensive, there are numerous facilities around the world that focus on recreating space-like conditions on Earth. One of those stations is the Jules' Undersea Lab, where the SEA STAR simulated space mission took place.

This underwater habitat was called "La Chalupa" when it was built in the 1970s. Its purpose was to allow divers to live and perform research as aquanauts — people who spend more than 24 hours underwater in a so-called state of saturation. Today, the Jules' Undersea Lab is located near Key Largo, in Florida. However, it was originally designed to be mobile — inside a barge 20 feet wide and 60 feet long (6 to 18 meters).

The aquanauts could choose an ideal site for their research expeditions underwater and then have the facility be submerged. They did that by flooding most of its inside space, turning it from a boat to a submarine. Once their work was done, they could remove the water and move "La Chalupa" to another location.

Unfortunately, the funding to keep this facility running ran out over time, and it was moved one last time to its current home. Since then, the now Jules' Undersea Lab served as the research station for tens of different aquanaut missions, including a NASA 30-day project and two missions that set world records for the longest time living underwater (73 and 100 days).

On the inside, the underwater station is made up of a galley with a kitchen and dining/work area. Next to it there is a basic toilet, shower and the "moon pool," which is the equivalent of a door to get inside the habitat. The final area is the bedroom with two bunk beds, which can be split in the middle to create two bedrooms and provide additional privacy. Three windows throughout the habitat provide its dwellers with a view of a mostly green outside world.

To start our SEA STAR simulated space mission, we waved goodbye to our Mission Control team on "Earth" and dove down to enter the Jules' Undersea Lab through the "moon pool" at 25 feet (7.6 m) underwater. After that, we did not return to the surface again until five days later. We lived and worked the whole time underwater, performing our space-related research and "spacewalks" (a.k.a. exploration dives in scuba gear).

We were able to survive all this time in such a challenging environment thanks to a number of important life support systems keeping us alive. The communications and umbilical support cables (providing air, fresh water and power) for the habitat were originally supplied by NASA. All the piping and fittings are inside the submerged barge, protected from the air-sea interface and from encrusting marine creatures. There was also a direct line to Mission Control "on Earth" to help us in case of any emergencies.

Our schedule kept us busy all day every day to simulate what astronauts experience on the International Space Station (ISS). All four of us on the SEA STAR crew had research projects that we were responsible for, as well as daily tasks. These tasks involved cooking, medical checkups, cognitive tests, maintenance work and taking care of unexpected issues. As the Commander of the crew, I also made sure everyone was on top of their work and addressed any problems that came up.

We performed "spacewalks" in between all those other activities. They were pretty physically exhausting, which meant that we did not do additional exercise during the mission. I have been the Commander of 40 simulated space missions, and normally we exercise for at least an hour or two during each mission, just like astronauts on the ISS. Nonetheless, the pressure in the Jules' Undersea Lab was approximately twice as high as it was on the surface at sea level. This caused the crew to experience additional stress to their bodies, which is why no further exercise was required.

Even though our hands were full with activities during the mission, none of us felt particularly stressed out. Whether it was because of the effects of the pressurized conditions or thanks to good planning, we actually enjoyed our time living underwater. One of the nice surprises of the mission was that the food wasn't too bad, either. We were allowed to use a small crock pot, which meant we could eat soups, stews and overnight oats. Small joys like that boosted our spirits immensely.

Having said all that, the Jules' Undersea Lab did also make the isolation from our lives on Earth feel very realistic. While we didn't have a view of Earth like the astronauts on the ISS, our very green view of a completely different world outside our windows gave us an impression of living on another planet. It was the alien nature of our lifestyle 22 feet underwater and all the challenges that came with it that made this mission feel Mars-like. Our daily schedule grounded us, the extreme environment around us kept us on our toes and our scientific exploration helped us reach new frontiers.

You can follow Dr. Michaela Musilova at her website and on social media: @astro_michaela (Instagram, TikTok and Threads), @Dr. Michaela Musilova (Facebook) and @astro-michaela.bsky.social (Bluesky).

I have been dreaming of doing research in space as an astronaut my whole life, but for some reason, the thought of working underwater made me nervous. I’ve known for a long time that astronauts train underwater to simulate different scenarios they’re likely to experience in space. Diving was never an issue for me, either — I even made it as far as becoming a certified rescue diver. So what was the problem?

This summer, I led a simulated space mission in an underwater habitat called the Jules’ Undersea Lab. It is a research station that is located 22 feet (6.7 meters) underwater near Key Largo, Florida. You have to scuba dive to get in and out of the station. To become an aquanaut, you have to stay underwater for at least 24 hours in a so-called state of saturation.

I had been preparing for many years for this aquanaut experience, both as a scientist and as an analog astronaut. An analog astronaut is someone who takes part in a simulated space mission, where they live and work in conditions similar to those that astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) experience today, or will one day experience on the moon and Mars.

I’m no stranger to simulated space missions, either; I have been the Commander of almost 40 such missions in different facilities around the world. Almost all of those missions were on land, though, which made them substantially safer than a mission underwater. The risks of something going wrong during a simulated spacewalk or even during basic maintenance activities underwater are significantly higher than during standard analog missions on land.

Despite knowing all of that, a mission underwater was something I definitely wanted to experience to improve my skills as a leader, researcher and diver. However, the closer I got to the start of the mission, the more worried I became. My brain went through all the terrible scenarios that could occur during the mission while I was preparing for it — from someone’s gear malfunctioning during a spacewalk underwater to storms forcing us to evacuate in the middle of the night. Perhaps I still had some trauma from watching "The Abyss" by James Cameron as a child 😉.

Our mission was symbolically called SEA STAR, and I spent over a year organizing it. It took some time to get the right team and research projects together, as well as the necessary funding. My goal was to lead a mission simulating what astronauts go through on the ISS, both in terms of the diverse projects they work on and the challenges they face living in space. Only for us the deadly environment surrounding us wasn’t space, but water.

Since the health and safety of the crew is at higher risk during underwater missions, the team has to adhere to more strict procedures than they would need to during a simulated space mission on land. That, in turn, makes the mission feel more similar to an astronaut’s mission in space. The underwater environment also allowed us to perform neutral buoyancy experiments during simulated spacewalks, as well as scientific research focused on the effects of high atmospheric pressures on humans.

Our SEA STAR crew was composed of experienced analog astronauts and divers. Paul Bakken, an experimental engineer, was our Executive Officer responsible for most of the mission’s logistics. The Health and Safety Officer was Dr. Brandy Nunez, who performed microgreens research on top of overseeing the wellbeing of the crew. Our team’s Mission Specialist was Jenn Pint, who is an industrial safety expert. She was in charge of a project focused on developing a taxonomy for analyzing environmental and crew interaction factors in a space analog environment, in collaboration with Interstellar Performance Labs.

As the Commander of the crew, my main responsibilities were to make sure the crew was safe, in good health and spirits, getting along well and on top of their work. I worked with Paul to plan the mission’s schedule and to tweak it as needed — for instance, when we faced unexpected problems or some things were taking longer than planned. I also brought several research and educational projects with me on the mission, which I performed on top of my Commander duties.

Even though I was a bit concerned about the risks of the aquanaut mission before it started, I trusted my crew. I knew that we would find a way to problem-solve and face the challenges that would come our way, just like astronauts do in space. I was also looking forward to all of the interesting experiments that we had planned for the mission, which ranged from cognitive research under pressure to testing environmental student sensors.

In the end, I mostly had to trust myself that I had what it takes to not only perform this mission, but also to lead it. As I put on my scuba gear, before diving underwater for five days, I focused on the positive aspects of the mission. The nervous voices in my head made themselves heard a couple of times while I entered the water. Nevertheless, I was completely calm by the time I took my last breath of Earth air. I just waved at our collaborators on land, submerged myself and started our intense “space,” a.k.a. underwater, mission.

You can follow Dr. Michaela Musilova at her website and on social media: @astro_michaela (Instagram, TikTok and Threads), @Dr. Michaela Musilova (Facebook) and @astro-michaela.bsky.social (Bluesky).

SpaceX will soon notch a huge spaceflight milestone, if all goes according to plan.

The company will try to catch both stages of its Starship megarocket during the vehicle's next test flight, which is targeted for next month, founder and CEO Elon Musk announced during SpaceX's quarter 3 (Q3) earnings call today (Oct. 20).

If SpaceX succeeds, this "will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered," Musk said. "The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. So this is, I think, a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization and consciousness."

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully stacked.

As Musk noted, both of its stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will make Mars settlement and other grand exploration feats economically feasible.

Starship's recovery strategy is different than that for SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which are partially reusable. (The latter two rockets have expendable upper stages). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters come back to Earth on landing pads near the launch site or on ships at sea downrange. Super Heavy and Ship, however, will steer themselves directly back to their launch tower, which will capture each vehicle with its "chopstick" arms.

This will allow SpaceX to inspect, refurbish and refly Starship at an accelerated rate, which is a priority for the company: Musk has said he envisions launching Starship more than 10,000 times per year by 2030.

Starship has conducted 14 test flights to date, and SpaceX has pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of them. The company has not yet tried to catch Ship, which is a more difficult proposition, as the upper stage travels higher, farther and faster than the booster does.

Still, Musk is confident that SpaceX will pull off a Ship catch on the first try. (He did not give a specific target date for Flight 15, saying only that it was expected next month.)

"I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight," he said. "And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year, and and then accelerating next year."

Success would mean back-to-back Starship flights with huge milestones. On Flight 14, which occurred on Sept. 28, Ship reached orbit for the first time ever. It also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink Version 3 satellites — the first 26 members of a next-gen broadband constellation in low Earth orbit that will eventually consist of about 100,000 spacecraft.

The Starship Flight 15 preview was something of an aside during today's call. The event primarily served to announce SpaceX's financial performance during Q3, the three-month stretch that ended on Sept. 30.

And that performance was strong, company representatives said. SpaceX recorded revenues of $14.6 billion during Q3, an increase of 161% from the $5.6 billion earned during Q3 of 2025. The company had a net income of $4.4 billion during Q3, $5.5 billion better than the result from the same stretch last year, when SpaceX lost $1.1 billion.

Just $1.8 billion of 2026 Q3 revenue came from SpaceX's launch division. The vast majority was generated by two other segments — connectivity (services provided by its Starlink megaconstellation) and artificial intelligence (or, as the Trump administration has recently rebranded it, "superintelligence").

SpaceX thinks these latter two segments will continue to boom. That's why it's building the infrastructure to support thousands of Starship launches per year — to loft lots of Starlink satellites and AI data centers to Earth orbit. And the company believes that it's positioned to really start raking in the cash, starting as soon as next year.

"In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of '27 is somewhere between 500 billion [dollars] and a trillion," Musk said.

On Oct. 19, 2016, the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission arrived at Mars!

ExoMars 2016 consists of the Trace Gas Orbiter and the Schiaparelli lander. The orbiter and lander traveled there together and separated on Oct. 16, three days before the orbiter entered orbit around Mars, and the lander touched down on the planet's surface. But something went wrong during the lander's descent, and it crashed into the ground.

Schiaparelli did not survive the accident, but the Trace Gas Orbiter is still functional. It is currently circling the planet, looking for methane and other gases in the Martian atmosphere that could be evidence for possible biological activity.

Why it mattered

ExoMars 2016 was a landmark mission for the European Space Agency and designed to be the vanguard of a two-flight ExoMars program to send an orbiter, lander and rover to Mars.

Launched in March 2016, ExoMars 2016 aimed to achieve two goals for ESA and Russia. First, the mission aimed to use the Schiaparelli lander to test landing techniques that would be vital on a planned ExoMars 2018 rover. Second, the mission would deliver a critical orbiter around Mars to study the planet's atmosphere and serve as a communications link for that future Mars rover.

In the end, ExoMars 2016 was just a partial success, with ESA officials calling it "96% successful." due to the loss of the lander.

While Schiaparelli separated smoothly from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft, it stopped communicating with Earth just 1 minute before its planned landing on Oct. 19. Photos from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at Mars later revealed what appeared to be its crash site and, nearby, its jettisoned parachute. Officials suspect Schiaparelli did not fire its descent thrusters as designed in order to slow itself enough for a safe landing. A data glitch was cited as its cause.

The Trace Gas Orbiter, meanwhile, continues to study Mars to this day and has spent 10 years and counting studying the Martian atmosphere.

The launch of ExoMars 2018, which includes the Mars rover Rosalind Franklin, was delayed by the Schiaparelli failure, as well as the loss of its Russian Proton rocket when ESA severed its partnership with Russia over that country's war on Ukraine.

The ExoMars rover is now expected to launch no earlier than 2028, with a landing on Mars expected in 2030.

In 2026, another country took aim at Mars on this day.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency attempted to launch the ambitious Martian Moons eXploration mission (called MMX) to land a probe on the Mars moon Phobos and return samples to Earth.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

Editor's note: Japan launched its bold MMX sample-return mission to the Mars moon Phobos on Oct. 19) at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT).
Watch a replay of the liftoff and read our launch story here.

Japan will launch an epic mission to Mars today (Oct. 19), and you can watch the action live.

The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is scheduled to lift off atop an H3 rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT; 4:41 a.m. on Oct. 20 local Japan time).

You can watch it live via the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Coverage will begin at 2:45 p.m. EDT (1845 GMT).

As its full name suggests, MMX will focus on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos. They're both tiny compared to Earth's own moon; Phobos is just 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide, and Deimos is even smaller, with a diameter of about 8 miles (13 km).

They're also quite mysterious. While astronomers have a pretty clear understanding of our own moon's birth — it coalesced from material blasted into space when a Mars-sized planet slammed into Earth long ago — there's no consensus about Phobos and Deimos' origin story.

The duo "may be the remains of a massive impact on Mars that sent material into orbit around the planet, or they could be ancient asteroids that were captured by Mars' gravity billions of years ago," Tom Statler, MMX program executive and program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said in an Oct. 15 statement. (NASA is a partner on the mission, providing a scientific instrument, a technology demonstration, communication support and funding for American scientists on the MMX team.)

"Having the answer will help illuminate that early era when Earth and the other inner planets may have been acquiring much of their water and organic compounds," Statler added.

MMX will help provide that answer, if all goes according to plan.

The spacecraft will arrive in the Mars system in August 2027, then slip into orbit around Phobos a month later. It will study that moon and Deimos from a distance for about 18 months, then deploy the French-German Idefix rover onto Phobos' surface in early 2029.

The 55-pound (25 kilograms) Idefix "has two main tasks: providing information to prepare for the landing of the main spacecraft to collect samples, and analyzing the composition and texture of Phobos' surface," European Space Agency officials wrote in an MMX mission description.

"The gravity on Phobos is so low that Idefix will only weigh the equivalent of 15 grams [0.5 ounces] on its surface!" they added.

The MMX mothership's Phobos landing will occur in 2030. The spacecraft will grab at least 10 grams (0.4 ounces) of samples from the moon, then head back toward Earth with this extraterrestrial bounty. MMX's return capsule will land here in 2031, after which scientists around the world will scrutinize the Phobos sample for clues about the history and evolution of Mars and our solar system more broadly.

MMX was originally supposed to launch in 2024, but issues with the H3 rocket prevented it from doing so. Mars and Earth align properly for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months, so MMX had to wait a while for its next chance.

Japan already has an impressive sample-return track record. The country's Hayabusa mission brought home pieces of the asteroid Itokawa in 2010, for example, and Hayabusa2 did the same with material from the space rock Ryugu a decade later.

Editor's note: Japan launched its bold MMX sample-return mission to the Mars moon Phobos on Oct. 19) at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT).
Watch a replay of the liftoff and read our launch story here.

Japan's mission to Mars is one of the most ambitious in spaceflight history. It aims to become the first spacecraft to return to Earth from Mars orbit, carrying with it the first-ever samples from the Red Planet system.

The mission, known as Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), is a first-of-its-kind endeavor to study the origin of Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos. The robust undertaking includes a landing on Phobos to collect the samples — which will likely be the first from the Mars system to return to Earth — and a search for evidence that could shed light on events during the formation of the solar system billions of years ago.

MMX launched on an H3 rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center on Monday (Oct. 19) at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT; 4:41 a.m. local time in Japan, Oct. 20). After a 10-month journey to reach Mars, the spacecraft will spend about three years studying Phobos, deploying a rover and landing to collect its samples. The mission will then shift its focus to Deimos for a series of flybys before departing for Earth in November 2030. If all goes according to plan, the MMX sample-return capsule is scheduled to land in Australia in 2031.

The spacecraft

The MMX spacecraft is comprised of three main parts, as well as a small rover. After release from its H3 launch vehicle, a propulsion module will provide the boost to put MMX on course for Mars. MMX's main exploration module carries the microwave-size IDEFIX rover and most of the mission's scientific instruments, while the return module houses the sample-return capsule.

Japan's Mitsubishi Electric built MMX's three main modules, with the French space agency CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales) and Germany's DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt) jointly developing IDEFIX. The little rover is named for a dog in the 1960s French comic "Asterix," in a nod to the country's first satellite, Astérix, which launched in 1965.

IDEFIX carries a suite of cameras, as well as the Raman Spectrometer for MMX (RAX) and miniaturized radiometer (miniRAD) instruments to analyze Phobos' surface composition and temperature.

Most of MMX's scientific instruments are housed on the exploration module, like NASA's Mars-moon Exploration with Gamma rays and Neutrons (MEGANE, pronounced "meh-gah-nay") device, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), and France's MIRS (MMX InfraRed Spectrometer) instrument.

The exploration module also houses the Japanese-built TENGOO (TElescopic Nadir imager for GeOmOrphology) tight-zoom camera, wide-angle OROCHI (Optical RadiOmeter composed of CHromatic Imagers) multispectral camera, laser altimeter (LIDAR) and Mass Spectrum Analyzer (MSA). The return module, meanwhile, carries Japan's Circum-Martian Dust Monitor (CMDM) and Interplanetary Radiation Environment Monitor (IREM).

The mission

MMX will arrive in orbit around Mars in August 2027, at which point it will shed its propulsion module and transition into a quasi-satellite orbit (QSO) around Phobos that allows the probe to fly in a sort of formation with the small, asteroid-sized moon as they both circle the Red Planet.

The spacecraft will spend its first few months in the Martian system observing Phobos from different altitudes, using its TENGOO and OROCHI cameras, LIDAR and MSA to map the moon's surface, study its composition and select potential landing sites.

IDEFIX will be released in late 2028 or early 2029, during the first of two MMX landing rehearsals, at about 130 feet (40 meters) above Phobos. Due to the 14-mile-wide (22 kilometers) moon's extremely low gravity, the rover will be able free-fall to the surface damage-free (hopefully), right itself after a few bounces and begin exploring to gather data on the terrain and surface conditions.

MMX sample collection could begin as early as December 2028, the acting director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, Lindsay Hays, said during a mission briefing on Oct. 15. The spacecraft will attempt two collection landings, with its exploration and return modules descending and returning to orbit as one vehicle.

On Phobos' surface, two different sampling mechanisms — the Corer Sampling Mechanism (C-sampler) and Pneumatic Sampling Mechanism (P-sampler) — will extract and collect at least 10 grams (0.35 ounces) of material for stowage inside the spacecraft's return capsule before MMX lifts off again for orbit. After its first touchdown and sample collection, MMX will return to QSO near Phobos before descending to a second landing site for a similar attempt and subsequent return to orbit.

MMX will end its observations of Phobos after about three years focused on the Martian moon, and will transition into a higher, resonant orbit around Mars in 2030. That course will repeatedly intersect Deimos' path for a series of flybys to collect and compare data with those from Phobos observations as scientists aim to investigate the moons' origins.

Near the end of 2030, the exploration module will separate, leaving the return module to fire its engine out of Mars' gravitational influence and begin an eight-month journey back to Earth with the collected samples. As MMX closes the last stretch of void during its approach to Earth in 2031, the sample-return capsule will separate and enter the atmosphere for a targeted parachute landing in Australia's Woomera region, where its contents will be recovered for laboratory analysis by Japan and its mission partners.

Phobos and Deimos

Those samples, and the data collected by MMX, could tell scientists a lot — about the moons' composition, geography and, perhaps most importantly, how they came to exist in the first place. There are two leading theories for Phobos and Deimos' origins, both of which point to very different versions of ancient Martian history.

"Phobos and Deimos are interesting, but not just in their own right. Their presence is a key piece of the larger story of the Mars system," said Tom Statler, MMX program executive and scientist in NASA's Planetary Science Division, during the Oct. 15 mission briefing. "By uncovering the moons' origin, we'll gain new insights into the history of both Mars and Earth, especially those events that shaped both planets billions of years ago and helped create the worlds we see today."

Both Phobos and Deimos are relatively small and irregularly shaped, and bear several resemblances and spectral characteristics to primitive D-type asteroids — ancient bodies thought to preserve material dating back to the solar system's formation about 4.6 billion years ago. Those similarities suggest Phobos and Deimos may have formed elsewhere in the solar system and were later captured by Mars' gravity.

Their near-circular, equatorially-aligned orbits around the Red Planet, however, somewhat complicate that theory. For example, a captured asteroid would be much more likely to have entered an elongated and tilted orbit akin to the direction and velocity of its original approach, scientists say. A competing hypothesis, therefore, offers a much more violent, but somewhat familiar, narrative for the moons' origins.

An enormous collision with ancient Mars could have blasted material into orbit to form a debris disk from which the two moons eventually coalesced. Such a process, which would be similar to the formation of Earth's moon, could explain their circular, equatorial orbits.

The contradicting geological and orbital observations for Phobos and Deimos collected to date have prevented scientists from definitively establishing one hypothesis over the other. MMX aims to provide an answer.

"It's two totally different lines of evidence that point in two different directions. That's what makes it an interesting puzzle," Statler said. Several theories have also been presented for hybrid scenarios combining the two, he added.

"There's all kinds of different ways, all kinds of different combinations of those two basic scenarios," Statler explained. "But that's the puzzle from the start, the two seemingly contradictory lines of evidence that are pointing us to what … the real history was, but we don't know what it is yet."

The science

Each theory for where Mars' moons came from predicts different chemical characteristics for their surfaces. Presumably, captured asteroids would preserve chemical signatures of material originating elsewhere in the solar system, potentially rich in volatile elements like hydrogen. Moons formed through a planetary impact, however, would contain a mixture of Mars and impact material, altered by the intense heat of such a violent collision.

Determining which scenario is more likely could reveal whether Mars experienced a massive moon-forming collision or acquired its moons from elsewhere in the early solar system. Either answer could offer new insights into the planet's evolution and the events that shaped the terrestrial planets like Earth billions of years ago, mission team members say.

"At this point, we know nothing about the composition of Phobos," David Lawrence, MEGANE principal investigator at APL, said during the Oct. 15 briefing. "We have information about mineralogy, but no elemental composition. And so, elements are really a key way to get at some of these foundational questions."

MMX's scientific suite has been carefully calibrated to make those determinations. The cameras and sensors on the MMX exploration module's TENGOO, OROCHI and LIDAR instruments will map Phobos' terrain, geological features and variations in surface materials from orbit, to provide clues about the moon's formation and evolution. Complementing those measurements, MIRS is designed to detect and classify Phobos' surface minerals and search for organic compounds to further differentiate its possible origin as an asteroid or ancient chunk of Mars.

The RAX spectrometer and miniRAD instrument aboard IDEFIX will add localized context to those observations by examining surface mineralogy and their thermal properties up close.

Back in orbit, NASA's MEGANE instrument will measure Phobos' elemental composition through gamma-ray and neutron spectroscopy that can scan tens of centimeters beneath the moon's surface for signs of volatile elements. Higher abundances of hydrogen, chlorine, sodium and potassium, for instance, would favor the asteroid-capture hypothesis, while lower abundances of those compounds could point to the heat and chemical deterioration associated with a planetary impact.

"In Japanese, 'megane' means eyeglasses," Lawrence said. "So we like to think of MEGANE as being an instrument that will look at Phobos with gamma ray and neutron glasses."

When compared to the samples MMX will return to Earth, MEGANE's findings could help scientists determine if volatile depletion found on Phobos reflects the intense heat of a post-impact formation or billions of years of subsequent erosion from the natural effects of space exposure.

MSA, meanwhile, will measure charged particles around Phobos, searching for evidence of subsurface ice and investigating how solar wind exposure has altered the moon's surface. It will also study atmospheric particles escaping from Mars. CMDM will measure dust around Mars, including particles potentially ejected from its moons by impacts.

Comparative observations of Deimos after MMX's final departure from Phobos will help establish whether the moons share similar compositions and, potentially, a common origin.

Once safely returned to Earth, laboratory analysis of the Phobos samples will allow scientists to examine chemical composition and mineralogy with a precision beyond that of MMX's onboard instruments. Tests like isotopic analyses — measuring subtle differences in the atomic makeup of elements — can help identify the samples' origins by comparing their chemical fingerprints with those of Martian rocks and asteroid material.

JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) scientists think some returned material could even originate from Mars itself, deposited on Phobos after ancient asteroid impacts blasted rocks off the Red Planet's surface, potentially holding evidence of its geological past.

International effort

The JAXA-led mission represents interagency partnerships with NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which are providing hardware and communications support through the Deep Space and Estrack networks.

NASA's contributions to MMX also include MEGANE, the Honeybee Robotics-built P-sampler, and an approximately $87 million investment through the end of the mission. NASA is funding the United States scientists on the MMX team, who will, alongside NASA's astromaterials experts, "be fully involved in the examination and scientific analysis of the Phobos samples when they are delivered to Earth," Hays said during the mission briefing. "We get all of the value and all of the scientific participation at a lower cost total [than funding the entire mission]."

For its role, NASA will receive at least 15% of the returned samples, with materials to be maintained at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston for analysis and long-term preservation. To that end, MMX's scientific impact could extend far beyond the mission's conclusion.

"The Phobos samples will be historic," Statler said, with the potential "for future research to answer the questions we don't even know yet how to ask."

NASA is accelerating the development of three helicopters that will be deployed into the sky above Mars after a voyage aboard NASA's Space Reactor‑1 Freedom spacecraft.

Slated for launch in 2028, SR-1 Freedom is the first fission nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft and is assigned the duty of dropping off the SkyFall entry capsule loaded with the trio of aerial vehicles at the Red Planet. SR-1's trajectory will deliver the SkyFall helicopters in Mars' northern hemisphere during the planet's spring season to avoid dust storms.

SkyFall is based on the success of the first aerial craft to float about the Red Planet, Ingenuity, which flew over 70 missions at Jezero Crater before it finally broke a rotor. It was designed to fly five. The SkyFall mission will consist of three identical helicopters to be deployed by an entry vehicle in the atmosphere, let loose at roughly under a mile (3,300 feet or 1,000 meters) above Mars, with each of the craft landing independently.

Regions of interest

The SkyFall mission is to conduct investigations that address objectives relevant for science and preparing for human exploration of Mars. Anticipated flights of the vehicles will travel outside of the landing ellipse to regions of interest within a broader exploration zone.

However, there are further science-focused flight paths and regions that have yet to be determined. NASA intends for the SkyFall helicopters to go to multiple regions of scientific interest on Mars.

NASA's Mars Exploration Program, along with the SkyFall project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will work together to pick those "why and where" paths to navigate.

A first workshop on potential landing sites for the SkyFall mission and adjacent exploration zones of high scientific value is slated for early next year. And as always, sites and zones on Mars for the choppers means satisfying engineering constraints imposed by the project and spacecraft design.

Given the rapid development cadence of the SkyFall mission, decisions are to be fast-paced, but are geared to maximizing science value of the endeavor.

What Mars researchers are after will be a ranked list of potential landing sites that will be studied in more detail by the SkyFall project and science community, prior to a second workshop to be held in late 2027.

Notional flight trajectories

On the table are potential science value and notional flight trajectories of individual landing sites given the capabilities and payload of the SkyFall helicopters.

Landing site selection will occur after the back-to-back landing site workshops next year, said Matthew Golombek, SkyFall Project Scientist at JPL.

"The project has identified a design reference landing site that targets subsurface water ice deposits with glacial/periglacial terrains," Golombek told Space.com.

Given their deployment, how much real estate will the aerial vessel assault study?

Golombek said that the helicopters are capable of flying one to two kilometers every other sol, so flight traverses of 125 miles to a little over 185 miles (200-300 kilometers) are possible.

"The helicopters are designed to last 6 months, with a goal of one Earth year and each can fly every other sol so multiple flights are expected," Golombek added.

Thanks to the success of the Perseverance rover's unleashing of the Ingenuity rotorcraft, Golombek said that there are a host of lessons learned, as well as engineering additions to be made to the set of SkyFall vehicles.

Nominal payload

"Although the helicopters are slightly larger than Ingenuity, they are being designed to operate in exactly the same way, so all of the experience with Ingenuity operations will be directly relevant," said Golombek.

The nominal payload to be toted around the Red Planet will be identical for all three helicopters, consisting of five instruments, plus engineering navigation cameras. Those instruments are to investigate the subsurface structure of Mars, the geomorphology and geology of surface terrains, as well as look at the meteorology of the atmosphere and the radiation environment.

Although there is no dedicated hardware to directly measure winds, the helicopters themselves can serve as on-the-spot wind sensors, even shifting to "Balloon Mode," whereby a helicopter will drift in the background wind.

Radar love

Each low-flying helicopter is outfitted with a ground penetrating radar (GPR) instrument, one that can detect layering in the near surface, at depths unobservable by orbital radar.

Those layers could be assembled from rocky material, buried ice, or combinations of the two. Detection of near-surface ice is of interest both scientifically as well as in support of future human expeditions to Mars.

Subsurface ice not only preserves a record of past Martian climate but also serves as a "high-priority environment" that might have served as a habitat of past…or Martian life resident today.

SkyFall maneuver

AeroVironment of Arlington, Virginia is partnering with JPL, selected last August to co-design and co-manufacture the SkyFall helicopters. They too are building on their experience as co‑developers of NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter that made those 72 flights at Jezero Crater on Mars.

"Now, with SkyFall, we're taking AV's high‑volume uncrewed systems mindset into planetary exploration and showing that Mars helicopters can be built as a repeatable product line, not a one‑off delivery," said Jeff Rodrian, Head of MacCready Works, AV's advanced research and development organization.

A special "SkyFall maneuver" is to be utilized in deploying the three aerial craft. They will be released directly from the carrier spacecraft into the Martian atmosphere, where they separate, deploy, descend, and land under their own power.

"By eliminating the need for a single-use lander stage or a host rover (as Ingenuity required with Perseverance), this approach significantly reduces the technical and financial risk of getting to the Martian surface," explains an AeroVironment statement.

Mountains of data

"Just like here on Earth, Mars helicopters can cover distance quickly and can go places that might be impossible to reach by ground," said Will Pomerantz, Head of Space Ventures at AeroVironment.

The science community may guide these helicopters to locations, Pomerantz said, where the ground penetrating radar can map out the specific spots of ice below the martian surface.

"The three SkyFall helicopters are going to show us parts of Mars we've never seen before and return mountains of data for scientists to pore over," said Pomerantz.

A new image from the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft reveals the powerful erosive forces that have shaped and re-shaped the surface of the Red Planet over long periods of geological time.

What is it?

This new Mars Express image captures Amazonis Mensa, a large, flat mountain on the Red Planet that offers planetary scientists a glimpse into the many factors that can sculpt a world's surface.

In this photograph, several features stand out to help illustrate this. Easiest to make out are the large round craters created by ancient impacts on the surface of Mars. However, many of these craters have been at least partially filled by lava flowing across the surface of the Red Planet around three billion years ago, according a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA) accompanying the image.

More interestingly, rippled structures known as yardangs can be seen to the left and right sides of the image. These ridges "form as loose sand particles are whipped up by wind and deployed a little like a cosmic sandblaster," according to ESA.

In the image, the two groups of yardangs ripple across the Martian surface in two different directions. This is because Amazonis Mensa acts as a windbreak, pushing material blown by winds in separate orientations.

Why is it incredible?

For over 20 years, Mars Express has been providing scientists with an unparalleled look at the Martian surface, helping us better understand the forces that have shaped the Red Planet over eons.

SpaceX wants to start flying its Starship megarocket a lot more often.

The company has requested permission to launch Starship from its Starbase site in South Texas up to 456 times per year. That's a big jump from the currently allowed cadence of 25.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in the early stages of reviewing the request. Today (Oct. 14), the agency announced "its intent to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, open a public scoping period and hold public scoping meetings for SpaceX’s proposal."

Starship, which stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It's also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX believes will revolutionize spaceflight.

The megarocket has flown 14 times to date, all of them test flights from Starbase, which is near the Texas border city of Brownsville. On the most recent jaunt, which lifted off on Sept. 28, Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the first members of a new broadband constellation that could eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft.

Assembling that network will require a lot of Starship launches. And even more will be needed to build SpaceX's planned Starmind AI megaconstellation, which Elon Musk has said will harbor a million satellites. Indeed, the world's richest man has said that SpaceX is targeting more than 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030.

Not all of those flights will originate from Starbase, which hosts two orbital pads. SpaceX is working to get three Starship pads up and running on Florida's Space Coast, and the company aims to break ground on a $100 billion, 12-pad complex in Louisiana next year.

Each operational Starship launch will also feature two landings. Both of the vehicle's elements — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage — are designed to return to the pad after liftoff, where they will be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. So SpaceX's proposal for 456 launches from Starbase per year includes a request for approval for 912 landings.

SpaceX plans to work up to this cadence in two phases, according to the FAA. Phase 1 "would include up to 100 annual launches and up to 200 annual landings (100 of Starship and 100 of Super Heavy)," the agency wrote. "Launches and landings could occur any day or time of the week."

Phase 2 covers 456 launches and 912 landings, which would occur only Monday through Friday, though at any time on those days.

The FAA will hold five "public scoping meetings" about the proposal next month, four of them in person in the Starbase area and one of them virtual.

There will be two in-person meetings on Nov. 17 at Texas Southmost College, one from 1-3 p.m. local (Central) time and the other from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Two in-person meetings will follow on Nov. 19, at the same two times but at a different location: the Port Isabel Event & Cultural Center.

The virtual meeting will be held Nov. 18, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Central time. Registration is required for all of these meetings, even the virtual one. You can register here.

Starship just reached orbit for the first time, carrying satellites for SpaceX's Starlink program. Analysts disagree on whether that's a detour or the destination — and what of the company's plans for the Red Planet?

Ten years ago, Elon Musk stood on stage at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, and unveiled plans for a giant spaceship to carry people to Mars. This past Sept. 28 — a decade and a day later — the descendant of that vehicle reached orbit for the first time, on Starship's 14th-ever test flight.

The designs and hardware evolved greatly over those 10 years. For example, the 2016 design, called the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), employed carbon fiber, but this gave way to the stainless-steel Starship, which SpaceX began testing in 2019 with short hops from its Texas site. Prototypes flew to high altitude and landed, and some exploded, until SN15 stuck a landing in May 2021. That same year, NASA selected Starship as the first astronaut lander for its Artemis lunar missions.

The full Starship stack — a Super Heavy booster with a Ship upper stage on top — first flew in April 2023 and failed within minutes. Three flights followed in less than a year, each reaching space, and each ending with Ship lost on reentry. During a 2024 test flight, SpaceX moved liquid oxygen between two tanks inside one Ship, the closest it has come to the propellant transfer that any mission to the moon or Mars will require. In June of that year, the company brought both stages down in controlled splashdowns, and that October the launch tower's mechanical arms caught a returning Super Heavy booster for the first time.

Progress wasn't linear, however. After a booster catch in January 2025, a string of Ship failures followed, and one upper stage exploded during ground testing that June. A clean flight in August 2025 helped break the streak, and by that October, SpaceX flew the last of the older design. The first Starship V3 launched in May 2026. Another went up in July, and Flight 14 followed on Sept. 28.

'A different beast'

"ITS was definitely a different beast," said Matija Renčelj of the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI). "Yet, we have to acknowledge two trends that both attest to SpaceX's agility and increasingly market-first rather than vision-first outlook."

"The gap between ITS and Starship is real, but I would not consider that a failure," he said.

In his view, the rocket is mainly a business tool. "The rocket is the means, not the end," Renčelj said, adding that its main role now is cutting Starlink deployment costs. SpaceX currently operates a constellation of more than 11,000 Starlink broadband satellites, almost all of which were launched by its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. But Starship Flight 14 lofted the first members of the next-gen Starlink V3 constellation, which will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan. Starlink V3 satellites are bigger and heavier than their predecessors and can only be launched efficiently by Starship.

Renčelj said the moon focus reflects Washington's priorities and SpaceX's interest in staying central to NASA's Artemis program, and in reassuring investors after the company's acquisition of xAI this past February and its IPO, which occurred in June.

Joseph Gonzalez, a University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering aerospace professor who spent about a decade working on Artemis, sees it differently.

"I think SpaceX is still very much targeting Mars," he said. "SpaceX continues to stress making humanity multiplanetary and establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars as long-term objectives." Gonzalez sees the moon as a proving ground rather than a replacement. Just days away from Earth, the moon lets engineers find problems "before committing humans to a Mars mission."

"Space exploration takes time, especially when you are developing a human spaceflight system with this level of complexity," Gonzalez said. "They build, fly, learn, make changes and fly again. That creates very visible successes and failures, but it also allows engineers to accumulate flight experience and data quickly."

Challenges remain

Reaching Earth orbit isn't the hard part for Starship. Gonzalez said that the most underrated gap is the large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer between vehicles once in orbit. SpaceX has moved propellant between tanks in one Ship before, but its architecture requires numerous transfers involving tanker ships to refill a fuel depot, which a Ship must visit in order to make journeys to the moon or Mars. Gonzalez described this depot as a gas station in space, but there are challenges typical gas stations don't face. The fuel is extremely cold, for example, and it needs to be moved in microgravity conditions.

That milestone is yet to happen, and the timeline for an attempt is not clear. It could potentially come with Flight 15 and 16. These were aspirationally scheduled for no earlier than mid and late October, respectively, but have now apparently slipped to mid-to-late November (though there has been no public confirmation of any firm target date).

In 2025, Musk said there was a "50/50" chance of Starship making a run for Mars in 2026. However, with the once-every-26-months Mars launch window — which lasts a few weeks, opening in late October — and no propellant transfer demonstration yet in the books, that is off the table. The next such low-energy orbital transfer opportunity for the Red Planet opens in late 2028, running into early 2029. At the same time, NASA is currently targeting late 2028 for its Artemis IV mission — which involves Starship — to return humans to the lunar surface after an absence of more than 50 years, giving SpaceX a challenging deadline toward which to work. The company will need to dedicate key resources to meet that timeline, including developing life support systems for crew.

For now, Starship's most immediate role is hauling Starlink satellites in orbit. Renčelj noted that startups raising billions are betting on Starship delivering low super-launch prices along with Falcon 9-like reliability. "Their business models are underpinned by what might be a single point of failure," he said.

"Starship still has major capabilities to demonstrate before it can perform the complete missions envisioned for the moon and Mars," said Gonzalez.

"So I would say the timelines are comparable considering the ambition of the vehicles," he added. "The bigger difference isn't necessarily how many years they have taken, but it's where and how each program chooses to learn during those years."

Musk has repeatedly talked of getting thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people on Mars "to make life multiplanetary." Most immediately, SpaceX has a number of business goals and lunar commitments to adhere to ahead of a first uncrewed visit to Mars. Late 2028 appears to be the next real opportunity.

In a milestone achievement, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has broken the record for most miles driven on a world beyond Earth.

On Oct. 11, Perseverance hit 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers) traveled on Mars, breaking the record previously held by NASA's Opportunity rover which went 28.06 miles (45.16 km). It took Oppy 14 years to cover all that ground; Perseverance, by contrast, has been on Mars for just 5.5 years.

The new record is far from the end of Perseverance's journey, however; the mission team thinks the rover could eventually more than double the distance it's already traveled.

"Our original design was only planned to last for [about] 20 kilometers of driving," Mark Maimone, a rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, told Space.com.

"We've more than doubled that already … and we're looking really good to go for up to 100 kilometers total," added Maimone, who works as a designated principal in autonomous planetary rover navigation on Perseverance and helped to develop the autonomous driving systems on NASA's previous Mars rovers.

"So we could double what we've done so far," he said. "And we have great expectations that [Perseverance] can continue its mission of exploring and collecting really useful and beneficial samples that will tell us so much more about the history of Mars."

Indeed, Perseverance remains in great shape, mission team members stressed.

"We are very fortunate that all of Perseverance's original capabilities are more or less intact, especially for the science instruments," JPL's Vivian Sun, the mission's deputy project scientist, told Space.com.

Perseverance landed on the floor of Mars' 28-mile-wide (46 km) Jezero Crater in February 2021. It was far from the first robot to traverse the planet's surface; the Perseverance team built on years of experience with the Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers.

Through the triumphs and missteps of these previous craft, NASA learned how to better explore another planet with a rover operated from millions of miles away. Perseverance saw massive improvements made to everything from its specialty wheels to its autonomous driving system and onboard tools and instruments.

This "could not have been done without the previous missions that we've sent to Mars," Sun said.

"Five years later [after landing], we're definitely a very well oiled machine," she added. "There's a lot of technical advancements on Perseverance that are the result of many people, many engineers, working on this new technology year after year for decades now."

And, according to both Sun and Maimone, this teamwork is the real secret behind Perseverance's endurance and success.

"The magic sauce for our operations team is how cohesively we work together," Sun said. The engineers, rover drivers and science team all work together and keep each other's work in mind as they make decisions on everything from driving speed to science targets, she added.

"I'm just super appreciative of all the people that have and still work on the mission. They're really what makes the mission special," Sun said.

What's next for Perseverance

As the team mentioned, Perseverance is nowhere near done on Mars. The rover could keep driving for many more miles on the Red Planet, and the scientists and engineers at NASA have big plans and high hopes for its future.

"We are currently planning to continue down south on the crater rim," Sun said. "There's a whole diversity of different rocks along this crater rim going south that we want to investigate and figure out how it indicates conditions from early Mars."

Jezero is a giant crater created by an impact from an asteroid or comet billions of years ago. Perseverance's work has shown that Jezero hosted a lake for long stretches billions of years ago. Scientists are therefore eager to continue exploring the site, searching for clues about what the planet looked like in the ancient past, and if it could have possibly hosted life.

"There are huge chunks of pre-Jezero crust that were embedded in the stratigraphy or got thrown up by the impact, and they're now incorporated onto the crater rim," Sun said. "These are our chance to probe like really old rocks that don't really exist in any other form on the surface anymore."

As part of Perseverance's next steps south on the crater rim, the team is heading toward an area called "Rainbow Falls."

Sun said that the Rainbow Falls area is thought to have kaolinite, a clay mineral that forms when water interacts with rock. By studying these types of minerals, mission scientists might be able to get a better idea of the conditions on Mars all of those billions of years ago, when water filled Jezero Crater.

"Whenever we are looking at clay minerals, I think the question of habitability and the search for potential biosignatures is always on the table," Sun said. "So that is very much the case when we get to Rainbow Falls, or even when we see kaolinite."

A new genetically engineered microbe may one day help humanity settle Mars, a nonprofit biotechnology research startup suggests.

Our species has launched nearly 50 missions to Mars since 1960, all of them robotic. If everything goes according to plan, they've all been building toward crewed Red Planet flight, which remains a high priority for national space agencies and private companies alike.

Ideally, human crews there will not rely on shipment after shipment from Earth, but can instead make use of any resources they can unearth on Mars for air, food, water, building supplies and more. Perhaps the most radical possible outcome from this approach is the concept of terraforming Mars — transforming the cold, arid world to support life as we know it.

Now, researchers at Pioneer Labs in Emeryville, California, have developed a microbe they suggest may be a useful, safe first step toward terraforming Mars.

"On Mars, nature will do the same jobs for us that she does on Earth — create fertile soil, shelter, oxygen and food," Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of Pioneer Labs, told Space.com.

A key problem with the idea of terraforming Mars is that the Red Planet's surface is essentially toxic. While raw materials potentially useful for Earth life are found in abundance on Mars, they are mixed in the soil with toxins such as perchlorate, as well as salts that would make growth difficult for most organisms.

Previous strategies for growing plants on Mars included rinsing these poisons out, bringing supplemental fertilizers from Earth, or avoiding Martian soil entirely and using hydroponics. However, Pioneer Labs argues that these approaches do not scale up well in terms of time and expense.

The organization has developed a microbe, dubbed sPL.001, that can live off artificial, chemically accurate versions of Martian dirt, water and air. It can do this with having the toxins removed, or with fertilizer added. Moreover, it can generate bioplastics — a class of materials used nowadays on Earth for items as diverse as compostable cups and 3D printing filaments — that could be useful for building habitats on the Red Planet.

"Mars has all the raw materials for life in abundance," DeBenedictis said. "Life can grow entirely using nutrients in unprocessed Martian regolith. That’s special and different from other places, like the moon, which doesn’t have nutrients in the regolith."

In a new study, the scientists revealed how they took Earth microbes that could manufacture bioplastics and slowly exposed them to more and more Mars-like conditions over time.

"It wasn’t obvious this was going to work," DeBenedictis said. "The first time we tested growth of terrestrial microbes in Mars conditions, none of them grew! We had to keep going and test a lot more organisms before we realized we had just gotten unlucky the first time."

Eventually, the scientists evolved a tolerance for toxins normally found in Martian soil.

"It was so cool to see these microbes start growing better on simulated Mars nutrients," DeBenedictis said. "Life finds a way!"

To survive, the new microbe needs to grow inside a stirred, heated bioreactor that protects it from extreme temperature, radiation and the thin Martian atmosphere. It must also receive a processed form of air that gives the microbe the valuable nutrient nitrogen in the form of acetate, as normal Martian air has nitrogen levels too dilute for the microbes to live off. The organism is also not photosynthetic, so it cannot make its own food.

In another study, the researchers suggested that these limitations ensure their microbe cannot survive if it ever found its way outside on Mars. These measures reduce the risk that their microbe might contaminate the Red Planet as an invasive organism, especially if Mars ever did develop life of its own that might still exist in underground aquifers or within ancient salt crystals.

Samuel McKee, a DNA repair scientist at the University of Reading in England, found it believable that such a microbe could not accidentally terraform Mars.

"Many adapted or edited microbes on Earth do not survive outside of a fixed environment despite their evolution, or without a certain food supply," McKee, who did not take part in the new research, told Space.com.

In a third study, the scientists estimated that, thanks to the microbe, mission planners could fit everything needed to build a city on Mars onto a single rocket.

"The biggest limitation of what we’ve done is that simulated Mars isn’t actual Mars," DeBenedictis said. "We reconstructed the relevant chemistry of Martian regolith as carefully as we could from high-quality rover data from multiple locations on Mars. But ultimately, the real test will be doing this with actual Martian regolith."

Such research could find use beyond Mars.

"I am excited about how these avenues of research could impact our dealing with climate change on Earth or extreme environment habitats," McKee said. "Microbes can be utilized to generate much of the material and needs we have thanks to gene editing."

All in all, "we will be watching with anticipation when these microbes are finally launched to the Martian surface," McKee said.

Imagine the sun has just risen as you wake to the soft sounds of Martian dust swirling outside. You look out and what do you see? A beautiful mountain range, bathed in golden light.

While this imaginary scenario might not be possible today, if future astronauts ever get to enjoy their morning coffee on the Red Planet, this is what they might see.

What is it?

NASA's Curiosity rover recently captured a stunning new panorama of dawn breaking over a Mars mountain range

The panorama, made using six different shots captured of the view, showcases Martian cliffs on the northwestern edge of Mount Sharp.

Curiosity has been exploring this 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain for over a decade. Crawling up the mountain since 2014, the rover has explored all sorts of strange and unusual terrain. And now? It has captured a beautiful, peaceful Martian morning.

Why is it incredible?

Looking at this image, it seems almost Earth-like. Despite the complete lack of plant life (or any life that we're aware of), the view is reminiscent of mountains rising out of the deserts on our very own planet.

But what might feel like a familiar sight in a national park is an entirely different planet.

And by enjoying this view (and analyzing it scientifically), researchers can better understand how features like the cliffs on Mount Sharp formed.

Mars was once home to a variety of bodies of water like lakes and rivers. But what happened to the planet once it lost its atmosphere and, subsequently, its liquid surface water? How did the minerals left behind from these streams and lakes affect the Martian topography? These are just some of the many questions researchers aim to answer with observations like this.

The first Starship launch from Florida may be just a few months away.

All 14 of the SpaceX megarocket's test flights to date have lifted off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas — including the most recent, on Sept. 28, which saw Starship reach orbit for the first time.

But SpaceX is working hard to get three pads on Florida's Space Coast ready for Starship. And one of them, historic Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), is nearly there, according to the company.

"Things are going super well at 39A," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a briefing on Oct. 1 that primarily discussed that day's launch of the Crew-13 astronaut mission to the International Space Station.

The pad's new Starship launch tower is nearly complete, as is most other essential construction at the site, according to Scheiman.

"We've essentially done a lot of the initial build of the structures and the systems needed for launching Starship, and we're beginning to step into the sort of acceptance testing and operational testing prior to activation," she said. "So, we're kind of through the main construction and going into the proofing, testing — activation testing."

The work at Pad 39A began in late 2021. The fact that it's taken so long shouldn't be surprising, for Starship requires some very specialized infrastructure. After all, it's the biggest rocket ever built, standing about 408 feet (124 meters) tall. For comparison, SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles — the only rockets that have flown out of Pad 39A since SpaceX started leasing it from NASA in 2014 — are both about 230 feet (70 m) tall.

Starship is also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and its recovery operations are very different than those of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The first stages of those two rockets touch down either on a ship at sea or on a designated landing pad close to the launch site. But Starship's two stages — its Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to come back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the giant tower's "chopstick" arms. So finishing construction of Pad 39A's new Starship tower will be a very big deal.

Starship also employs different engines than the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy — Raptors rather than Merlins. Raptors burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX), rather than rocket-grade kerosene and LOX like Merlins, so the new Starship-friendly 39A needs a new tank farm to feed in this different mix of propellant.

SpaceX plans to launch at least one more Starship test flight from Starbase before flying the megarocket out of KSC, Scheiman said on Oct. 1 — meaning the first Florida Starship launch come come as soon as Flight 16.

The company has not yet announced target dates for upcoming Starship launches, but provisional planning documents identify Oct. 19 and Oct. 30 as possible "no earlier than" dates for Flight 15 and Flight 16, respectively. Those dates may be a bit aspirational, but they suggest that SpaceX aims to fly Starship again soon, and to launch two missions in relatively quick succession. (For perspective: Starship has flown three times so far this year — on May 22, July 24 and Sept. 28.)

Whenever Starship breaks in the new Pad 39A, it will be something of a blast from the past. The launch complex was originally built in the 1960s to host launches of a different megarocket — NASA's Saturn V, which sent the Apollo moon missions skyward. Pad 39A was the jumping-off point for some of the most iconic Apollo flights, including Apollo 8 in December 1968 and Apollo 11 in July 1969.

This tradition will continue, if all goes according to plan: NASA picked Starship's Ship upper stage to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next five years or so.

Ship is scheduled to fly for the Artemis program for the first time on Artemis III, a planned 2027 docking test in Earth orbit between the vehicle and NASA's Orion capsule. And that Ship liftoff will take place from Pad 39A, Scheiman said.

There's more pad work going on in Florida as well. Late last year, the U.S. Air Force gave SpaceX permission to fly Starship from two pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next-door to KSC. Those two pads — SLC (Space Launch Complex)-37A and SLC-37B — could eventually host 76 Starship liftoffs per year between them.

SpaceX has already made considerable progress on SLC-37A and SLC-37B, according to Scheiman. "If you look towards Launch Complex 37, you can see the beginnings of that Starship tower," she said on Oct. 1.

And SpaceX plans to break ground next year on an even bigger Starship launch site — the $100 billion, 12-pad Starbase Louisiana complex. Twelve new pads seems like overkill, unless you know that SpaceX aims to launch more than 10,000 Starship missions per year by 2030.

The vast majority of those liftoffs will serve to assemble two SpaceX megaprojects in Earth orbit: the next-gen Starlink broadband network, which will consist of about 100,000 satellites, and Starmind, an AI data center constellation that will feature a million spacecraft, according to Elon Musk.

Earth and Mars formed in the same part of the solar system, but their chemistry suggests the two planets were built in different ways, according to new research.

The finding adds to growing evidence that suggests planets do not all form in one way. It also has implications for a long-running open question about how exactly the disk of gas and dust around the young sun formed the planets of today's solar system around 4.5 billion years ago.

"The most surprising result was that Earth and Mars appear to have formed in different ways," Anders Johansen, a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who co-led the study, said in a statement. "You might have expected that two planets formed side by side in the same solar system would share a more similar formation history."

Around 4.5 billion years ago, the solar system was a crowded place. The young sun was ringed by a rotating disk of gas and dust with the first building blocks of planets taking shape within it.

In one long-standing picture, dust grains collided and stuck together to form pebbles, which grew into kilometer-wide rocky bodies known as planetesimals. Those planetesimals repeatedly crashed into one another and merged, building planets over a few tens of millions of years.

Whether Earth and Mars were built by one process or a mix of both has not been settled. The Copenhagen team set out to test the competing ideas by studying the chemistry of the planets' crust and mantle.

The researchers focused on volatile elements such as sodium, zinc and potassium, which evaporate easily at high temperatures. So whether those elements are present or missing acts as a chemical fingerprint of the heat and violence a planet went through while forming, according to the researchers.

"It is a major detective job to figure out what happened back then when most of the evidence disappeared long ago," Johansen said. "But even after 4.5 billion years, the compositions of Earth's and Mars' mantles remain the same."

What formation route suits best?

The team fed the data about the reservoirs of volatile elements of both Earth and Mars into computer models to test which formation scenarios fit best, and the results favor a hybrid model.

At least 75 percent of Earth's mass appears to come from two young planets, known as protoplanets, that grew large by gathering pebbles, while planetesimals supplied up to 25 percent, the study found.

For Mars, the team thinks that this balance was reversed, with roughly three-quarters of its mass appearing to come from planetesimals, and the remaining quarter from pebble accretion.

The exact chemical makeup of the raw material that became Earth and Mars is unknown, so the calculations depend on assumptions, the study notes. Nevertheless, adjusting those assumptions did not change the main conclusion, according to study co-lead Haiyang Wang of the University of Copenhagen.

The team argues that its method is more direct than the isotope-based approach widely used in the field, which "can often be interpreted in multiple ways," according to Wang.

The technique used by the researchers could eventually be applied to worlds beyond the solar system, extrasolar planets, or exoplanets.

As future missions find Earth-like planets around other stars, judging whether those worlds could be habitable will require some sense of what they're made of.

"If we understand how planets lose volatile elements during their formation, we can also become better at predicting how much water and other life-supporting substances they ultimately retain," Johansen concluded.

This research is described in a paper published Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The water ice at Mars’s north pole is not as dusty as planetary scientists thought, which could change how we think about the Red Planet’s past and present climate. That could, in turn, improve our understanding of Mars' prior habitability.

When dust is present in ice it acts as an insulator, absorbing sunlight and consequently causing the ice to melt or sublimate depending on the air pressure. Previous estimates suggested that the water-ice in Mars’ north polar cap and extended polar regions contained as much as 25% dust by mass.

"We know there is water-ice in the area surrounding the north pole of Mars, but there has been widespread disagreement as to how dusty that ice is," Aditya Khuller of the University of Washington said in a statement. "If it is dustier, the ice will be darker. Just like a dark t-shirt in the sun makes you warmer, dusty ice gets warmer and vaporizes faster on Mars."

However, a new analysis by Khuller and graduate student Pari Mohan using an alternate method has now concluded that the ice contains merely 3% dust by mass.

This means that not only does the ice absorb less sunlight, reducing the amount of ice that vaporizes into the Martian atmosphere, it also reflects more sunlight back into space because it is cleaner and therefore brighter.

The reflectivity of a planet is referred to as its albedo, and the more sunlight is reflected, the less is retained to help warm Mars, which needs all the warmth it can get sitting on the outer edge of the solar system's habitable zone.

A new way to look a Martian ice

This new conclusion is a consequence of Khuller realizing that the technique previously used by planetary scientists to determine the properties of Mars’ water ice was not the best model.

That technique was based on the properties of lunar regolith (dirt) on Earth’s Moon, but when Khuller applied it to ice on Earth, he found the results were not accurate. If it had problems describing the properties of Earth’s ice, was it really suitable for deducing the properties of Mars’ ice?

So Khuller and Mohan applied a tried and trusted technique derived by Steve Warren, professor emeritus at the University of Washington.

"His methods had been used successfully to study snow and ice on Earth for decades," said Khuller. "So I thought it would be interesting to adapt these Earth-tested methods to Mars."

Khuller and Mohan ran the numbers, which is when they came to the conclusion that the ice at Mars’ north pole was not as dusty as previous models had suggested. But what does that mean for Mars’ climate history?

Mars has ice caps at both its poles, and during winter they are covered in a frosty layer of carbon dioxide ice.

At the south pole, this layer is tens of feet deep, but at the north pole it is shallower, about a meter deep. In summer, that carbon dioxide ice sublimates into the air, and this happens faster at the north pole because of the relative thinness of the carbon dioxide. Exposing the more permanent water-ice cap beneath.

This is called the North Polar Residual Cap, which sits on top of numerous mile-thick layers of water-ice deposits, some dustier than others, collectively called the North Polar Layered Deposits. The residual cap is just the most recent active layer of what Khuller refers to as an "ice-cream sandwich."

The different layers of ice in this sandwich contain different amounts of dust, with dirtier layers sandwiching cleaner ones. Depending upon which layer was exposed to the air at the time, it would have affected Mars’ climate differently. The current residual cap appears to be scarce in dust and is contributing to Mars’ cold environment. However, these differences can even occur on an annual timescale with the coming and going of the carbon dioxide frost.

Orbiting satellites such as Europe’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey have been imaging and mapping the Martian surface, including the polar caps. These observations have noted the ice caps changing in brightness seasonally as the carbon dioxide ice builds up and then sublimates.

"By looking at how the brightness changed over time, we figured out that there is a frost that forms in the winter and it’s more dusty," said Khuller. "In the Martian summer it goes away, exposing cleaner, older ice."

There could also be a connection with possible habitable environments on Mars.

Mars wasn't always so barren and dry

In the past, when the dustier layers of the polar cap’s ice-cream sandwich were exposed, they would have absorbed enough sunlight to melt the bottom of their particular layer of ice. This would have created pockets of liquid water that would be rich in nutrients provided by the dust.

On Earth, shallow pools of dusty meltwater are usually teeming with microbes that become dormant when the water freezes again in winter and then reactivate when the ice melts in summer.

Mars' ice caps could therefore have provided the perfect habitat for microbial life, but as of yet we have not found any life on the Red Planet.

"The fact that Mars and Earth both have these similar layers of water-ice and dust is interesting," said Khuller. "Why does one planet have life and the other doesn’t?"

Khuller and Mohan’s research was published on 8 September in the journal npj Space Exploration.

If you're a night owl, or one who tends to wake up well before sunrise, you'll have a chance to catch a lovely view of a close get-together between a bright planet and the moon early on Monday morning, Oct. 5. Check out the east-northeast sky any time after 2 a.m. local daylight time to sight a 30% illuminated waning crescent moon. And situated just to the upper right of the moon, will be a relatively bright orange yellow "star."

But that's no star but a planet. Mars.

Currently situated 152 million miles (245 million km) from Earth, Mars has been gaining prominence in the morning sky since the start of summer — albeit very slowly. In the coming days and weeks, it will become increasingly more noticeable as it draws closer to us and continues to slowly ramp up in brightness.

Beauty in the eye of the bee-holder

The pairing off of the moon and Mars will be nice, but less than a week later it will be time to break out the binoculars and telescopes, for on the morning of Oct. 10, Mars will be located near the western edge of the famous Beehive star cluster, also known as Messier 44 or M44. Then, it will be placed almost right in the middle of the cluster on Oct. 11 and finally at the cluster's eastern edge on Oct. 12.

The Beehive is one of the brightest and finest open star clusters, located in the middle of the faintest of the zodiacal constellations, Cancer the Crab. Indeed, this celestial crustacean has no star brighter than 4th magnitude and its only claims to fame are its membership in the zodiac and beautiful M44.

Dual identity

But some astronomy texts speak of this star cluster as "Praesepe, the Manger." A manger is defined as "a trough in which feed for donkeys is placed." The cluster was apparently first called Praesepe 20 centuries ago. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) first resolved it into stars in 1610. It is easy to see through binoculars from the city and with the naked eye from a dark location. About 100 stars can be seen in good binoculars or a small telescope. The cluster's relatively "new" moniker — "Beehive" — apparently evolved almost four centuries ago, when some anonymous person, upon seeing so many stars revealed in one of the first crude telescopes, exclaimed: "It looks just like a swarm of bees!" The view through a small, low-power telescope brings out numerous stars of similar brightness ("the bees") in pairs and bunches assembled within a large, roughly elliptical area ("the hive"). Hence, the reason why some astronomy books call the cluster "Beehive," while others call it "Praesepe."

Perhaps the older designation "Praesepe" (traced back to the ancient Greeks) is preferable since in the middle of Cancer are two stars called the Aselli ("donkeys") known for over 2,000 years as Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis — the northern and southern colts — feeding from a manger.

Coming attractions

Mars will spend the rest of the month moving toward the bluish first magnitude star Regulus, crossing from Cancer into Leo the Lion on Halloween (Oct. 31). The Red Planet brightens a bit from magnitude +1.1 to +0.9 in October and thus will appear noticeably brighter than Regulus by the time it pulls within a dozen degrees of the star at month's end.

But before it reaches Regulus, it will pass just to the north of a much brighter Jupiter on Nov. 16.

The hour before dawn, when Mars is high in the southeast, is still the best time for telescopic observation. In a telescope, though, Mars is disappointing. Currently, in most instruments it appears as nothing more than an amber-hued dot of light, not yet big enough to reveal surface features through most amateur telescopes, so don't get your hopes up. Mars will continue to approach the Earth in the weeks and months to come and will be closest on Feb. 19, when it will be 63 million miles (101 million km) away.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

NASA's Perseverance rover has been busy exploring Mars' "Wild West."

What is it?

Perseverance has been exploring the Martian surface for more than five years. Starting this year, the rover began its journey through "Lac de Charmes," an area that the mission team considers the "Wild West frontier" for the rover, according to a recent update.

This region, which is west of the rim of Jezero Crater where the mission landed, is home to valleys and ridges, as well as some of the oldest rocks the rover has encountered yet.

To get to the "Wild West frontier," the mission team had Perseverance snake through different interesting areas. On the journey to "Lac de Charmes," the rover collected data that the team can use to better piece together the story of how the region formed and how it has evolved over the years.

Why is it incredible?

In this latest update, the mission team shared that, not only is Perseverance continuing to explore this region, but it's doing so with the help of a repurposed processor originally intended to allow the mission to talk to the Ingenuity helicopter.

With observations Perseverance has made so far, the mission has found that the igneous rocks in this area may have formed from cooling lava or magma, or even as the result of a violent impact, according to the update.

The rocks in this region are so old that they "formed when Mars was still a young planet bombarded by asteroid impacts, long before the sedimentary rocks inside Jezero Crater formed in rivers and lakes," Athanasios (Thanos) Klidaras, a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, said in the mission update.

"They therefore could teach us much about the earliest era of Martian history — and, more broadly, how rocky planets evolved during the tumultuous early history of our solar system," Klidaras added.

Those of us still humming on back-to-school energy can add some Red Planet flavor: We just marked the beginning of a new year on Mars.

The Martian new year officially clicked over today (Sept. 30) at 4:16 a.m. EDT (0816 GMT), when the Red Planet once again began its nearly 687-Earth-day journey around the sun.

But if you're a Martian, you wouldn't use Earth days. A Mars day, or "sol," lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes — the time it takes the Red Planet to rotate once. There are 668 sols in a Martian year.

Sept. 30 as New Year's Day on Mars is something of a human construct: Astronomers chose it because Sept. 30 marks the northern equinox, when spring begins in Mars' north and autumn starts in the south.

"Like Earth, Mars has four seasons — winter, spring, summer and autumn," officials with the European Space Agency (ESA) stated in a post about the Martian new year.

"Unlike Earth's seasons, Martian seasons are not of equal lengths due to Mars' more elliptical orbit," they added. "The planet's axial tilt causes the northern hemisphere to receive more sunlight during the northern summer, and the southern hemisphere to receive more sunlight in northern winter."

The strange seasons on Mars also bring a consequence: dust. In the back half of the long Martian year, the Red Planet gets closer to the sun and sees its atmosphere warm up. The warmth brings dust, as winds loft particles from the regolith on the surface.

"Once airborne, these brownish particles heat up and redistribute some of that warmth to the surrounding atmosphere. This process can rapidly pump a lot of dust," ESA stated.

Daily conditions on Mars are also tough, no matter the season. At noon in summer, for example, temperatures range between 32 degrees and 140 degrees Fahrenheit (0 and 60 degrees Celsius), but winter sees the mercury plunge to as low as minus 166 degrees F (minus 110 degrees C).

You can check out the conditions on Mars up close, by following along with NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers. These six-wheeled robots send back images nearly daily, and the agency generally provides a few updates about their activities each month.

Starship just notched a huge milestone, but it needs to check a few more boxes to get fully up and running.

The SpaceX megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — reached orbit for the first time ever on Monday (Sept. 28), during its 14th test flight to date. Starship also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink V3 broadband satellites on Flight 14, kicking off construction of a constellation that will eventually harbor 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan.

These were big successes, but they didn't vault Starship into full technological maturity; the rocket will have to clear a few more hurdles to get there. Here's a brief rundown of the most important ones.

Catching the Ship upper stage

Both of Starship's stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper-stage spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both of these vehicles back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms.

SpaceX thinks this recovery strategy will enable fast and efficient reuse, allowing the company to achieve seemingly outrageous launch cadences. Indeed, the company is targeting 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030, Elon Musk has said.

SpaceX has already pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy, doing so on three Starship test flights to date. But the company has yet to attempt one with the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship, which has always targeted an ocean splashdown to wrap up its missions.

That could change very soon. During an appearance at the All-In Summit on Sept. 14, Musk said that SpaceX may try to catch Ship on Flight 15, provided that Flight 14 went well.

The company has not laid out a mission profile for Flight 15, but Monday's success would seem to keep a Ship catch in play. We don't have an official launch date for the upcoming mission, either, but provisional planning documents peg Oct. 19 as the earliest possible target.

And another note about that launch cadence: SpaceX aims to achieve it by expanding launch operations of Starship, which has previously flown from just two pads at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. SpaceX is currently building three Starship pads on Florida's Space Coast, and it plans to break ground on the $100 billion, 12-pad Starship Louisiana complex in 2027. So that work will be going in the background of each upcoming Starship flight.

Off-Earth propellant transfer

Most Starship missions will stay in Earth orbit, deploying satellites for the Starlink V3 constellation and the company's even bigger "Starmind" data center network, which will consist of about a million satellites, if all goes to plan.

But some of the megarocket launches will send Ship farther afield — to the moon and Mars, for example. Indeed, NASA picked Starship's upper stage to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next decade or so.

Deep-space Starship missions will be more complicated than orbital ones, because they require more propellant. Ship cannot launch with much fuel onboard — doing so would make it too heavy — so each Ship bound for the moon or Mars will need to visit an off-Earth fuel depot, which itself will be a Ship variant.

This depot will need to be fueled up by special Ship "tanker" vehicles. It's unclear how many tanker flights will be required for each deep-space Ship mission, but the number is not negligible. For example, estimates for a Ship lunar-landing campaign range from eight tanker missions on the low end to 15 or 20 on the high end.

So in-space fueling is a key capability that Starship must demonstrate. SpaceX has taken some baby steps to this end already, successfully transferring propellant from one internal tank to another on Ship during Flight 3 back in March 2024.

But the company has not yet moved propellant from one vehicle to another in space. SpaceX may decide to try this as soon as Flight 15, but that's just speculation; we need to wait for an official mission description.

Getting Starship ready for astronauts

Starship was always envisioned to be a crew-carrying spacecraft. When Musk introduced it to the world back in September 2016, he framed the megarocket — then known as the Interplanetary Transport System — as the key breakthrough that would make Mars settlement feasible.

So SpaceX will need to incorporate a suite of life-support technologies into Starship and test them extensively before putting any people on board. And the clock is ticking on this task, thanks to the timeline that NASA has laid out for Artemis.

The agency plans to launch the crewed Artemis III mission in mid-2027, sending its Orion crew capsule to dock with Ship in Earth orbit. It's unclear if Ship will need to be crew-capable by then — the Artemis III astronauts may not enter Ship — but it will definitely have to be people-friendly by the time Artemis IV rolls around in 2028. That mission will land astronauts near the lunar south pole, in the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 in 1972.

And the timeline isn't the only driver for SpaceX. There's also competition for these flights; NASA has said it may fly Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander on Artemis III and/or Artemis IV if Ship isn't ready.

SpaceX won't be starting from scratch with its life-support tech; it can (and probably already has begun to) scale up the systems it has used on its Crew Dragon capsule, which has flown 20 astronaut missions to low Earth orbit to date.

As this partial list shows, the next few Starship missions should be just as exciting as Flight 14, if not more so. There will likely be a lot riding on each one.

A multi-celled extremophile that can survive in unprecedented temperatures has been found in pools of heated water within Lassen Volcanic National Park in California.

The discovery has potential repercussions in the search for alien life, widening the range of environments that could potentially support complex organisms.

Organisms that can survive in extreme environments are classed as extremophiles. When that extreme environment is related to heat, then the extremophiles are called "thermophiles." The new thermophile found in volcanic waters has been called Incendiamoeba cascadensis, nicknamed the "fire amoeba." It was found able to self-replicate via cell division at a temperature of 63 degrees Celsius (145 degrees Fahrenheit) and was still fully active, albeit no longer reproducing, at 64 degrees C (147 degrees F). Even at 66 degrees C (150.8 degrees F), the amoeba was still partially active, and while it shut down at 70 degrees C (158 degrees F), it was able to recover. However, 80 degrees C (176 degrees F) killed the flame amoeba.

Single-celled organisms have been found thriving at much greater temperatures. Methanopyrus kandleri is a single-celled organism that survives and reproduces in temperatures as high as 122 degrees C (252 degrees F). However, single-celled prokaryotes such as M. kandleri lack a cell nucleus and cell membrane, both of which can break down when subjected to significant heat, and the lack of these cellular components helps M. kandleri survive at temperatures well past the boiling point of water.

Complex, multicellular life — classed as "eukaryotes" in the tree of life — is more vulnerable to high temperatures. Unlike prokaryotes, eukaryotes do have cells with a nucleus and a membrane. The previous record for the highest temperature in which multicellular organisms were able to reproduce was 60 degrees C (140 degrees F) for some species of fungi and red algae, and researchers had grown pessimistic about the ability of eukaryotes to thrive at higher temperatures.

"In part, studies on eukaryotes may have been limited because of assumptions about membrane stability," Beryl Rappaport, a graduate student at Syracuse University and the lead scientist behind the research, said in a statement. "We are hoping that the discovery of I. cascadensis encourages others to keep searching for high-temperature eukaryotes."

The key to understanding the fire amoeba lies in its gene sequence. Rappaport's team were able to identify genes that stabilize and protect DNA at 63 degrees C, and also genes that allow the fire amoeba to sense its environment and the temperature around it. In some cases, gene activity even increased at high temperature, such as I. cascadensis' ability to fold proteins to serve various biological functions.

"We were able to uncover many strategies that could help I. cascadensis survive at high temperatures, and some of these strategies could be used by thermophiles across all life," said Rappaport. "For instance, some proteins in I. cascadensis have a high positive surface charge that could help them remain stable. These protein charges are similar to those found in thermophilic bacteria and archaea [single-celled microbes including prokaryotes]."

Intriguingly, the fire amoeba's DNA contains sequences of genes similar to DNA fragments found in geothermal samples as far and wide as New Zealand and the United States' Yellowstone National Park. The implication is that I. cascadensis, or its cousins, could exist all around the world and are just waiting to be discovered.

Similar thermophiles might exist beyond Earth, too. No other environments in the solar system share the temperate environment of Earth — there's either too much heat or too much cold, too much radiation or not enough light, too much acidity or toxic materials. And beyond our solar system we have yet to find a planet that has an environment like Earth. However, some extraterrestrial environments could potentially support what we would consider to be extremophiles — for example, on Mars or the Jupiter ocean moon Europa. The existence of I. cascadensis therefore broadens the range of temperatures in which eukaryotic life — and humans are also considered eukaryotes — can survive on other worlds.

"It could certainly be possible for complex life like I. cascadensis to survive on another planet, but Earth is the only planet we currently know of to have all the requirements for I. cascadensis to be happy," cautioned Rappaport. "It's not just about temperature. An environment also needs the right acidity, oxygen levels, pressure, water and food. I. cascadensis could not survive on its own. It needs other life to be supported as well."

So a thermophile would not be able to survive on airless, barren Mercury despite the high temperature. Thermophiles could, however, find a home on worlds slightly closer to their star than the traditional habitable zone or on highly volcanic worlds, so long as water is also present, which is not the case for Jupiter's volcanic moon Io.

The new study was published on Sept. 22 in the journal Cell.

Unusual formations in Mars' Arabia Terra region reveal the Red Planet's climate history.

What is it?

Like the wavy structures of a coral reef, layered deposits in the Arabia Terra region of Mars showcase the planet's strange beauty and even stranger past.

In this new image captured by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, you can see lighter deposits layered on top of larger formations in Martian impact craters.

And while the image itself is quite striking, it's more than just a pretty picture. This kind of visual data can help researchers better understand what has happened on the Red Planet over the years.

"Researchers have proposed that the rhythmic nature of the layers and their extensive coverage across much of Arabia Terra could be due to global cyclic processes, such as dust storms, perhaps involving groundwater," HiRISE co-investigator Cathy Weitz said in a recent blog post.

"The deposits are currently undergoing erosion, which has produced crenulations, pits, and jagged edges. Darker wind-blown (aeolian) ripples and debris has more recently covered and infilled portions of the layered deposit," Weitz added.

Why is it incredible?

This image stands out, first and foremost, for its unusual appearance. Peaks and valleys ranging from a light sandy color to a deep blueish-gray create an almost hypnotic landscape.

And it is amazing that, with a picture taken by a robotic spacecraft orbiting a planet that lies millions of miles from Earth, scientists can trace through billions of years of that world's climate history.

Every rock, every valley and every winding, sandy, fragmented feature holds an incredible amount of information about the planet it belongs to. So, even just through images from orbit, scientists have been able to slowly piece together Mars' history and the incredible changes the planet and its climate have endured.

On Sept. 27, 1997, NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission beamed its very last data transmission back to Earth.

Pathfinder was three months into what was supposed to be just a one-month mission on Mars when the base station's battery began to fail. NASA struggled to reestablish contact with Pathfinder for another five months before giving up and calling the mission complete.

The Mars Pathfinder mission consisted of a base station and the very first Mars rover named Sojourner. NASA launched the Pathfinder mission, which was led by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on Dec. 4, 1996, with the lander and reaching the Red Planet on July 4, 1997.

Why it mattered

NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander was a watershed mission or the space agency's effort to explore the Red Planet. As a Discovery class mission, was designed as one of the agency's "faster, better, cheaper" approaches to planetary exploration Its $262.3 million cost (in 1997 dollars) represented a fraction of the billions spent on NASA's larger Viking landers.

Pathfinder was actually a technology testbed of sorts, with NASA using the mission to test many techniques the agency would later use in future Mars missions. The most prominent of those techniques were the use of airbags to land Pathfinder on Mars, as well its Sojourner rover's rocker-bogie suspension system. Both technologies were scaled up for NASA's next rovers on Mars, Spirit and Opportinity, which launched in 2004.

In all, Pathfinder took more than 16,500 photos of its Ares Vallis landing site on Mars, with Sojourner snapping another 550 photos. They made 15 chemical analyses of Mars rocks and soil, and collected Mars weather data as well. The Pathfinder base lander was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station in honor of the late astronomer Carl Sagan.

The Pathfinder mission also demonstrated two key things: First, that a wheeled rover could successfully land and conduct science on Mars, and that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars lander and rover designs were robust enough to far outstrip their design life.

While Pathfinder and Sojourner were only designed to last 30 days, they managed to survive three times that during the actual mission. That pattern would be repeated with Spirit and Opportunity, which both launched on a 90-day primary mission but survived for years (Opportunity would ultimately last 14.5 years on Mars).

Sojourner's success not only paved the way for Spirit and Opportunity, but also for even larger rovers to come. NASA's car-sized Mars rover Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in 2012 and was followed by the Mars rover Perserverance in 2021. Both are powered not by solar arrays, which limited the lives of Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, but by a nuclear battery, with both rovers still active today.

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On Sept. 24, 2014, India's first interplanetary mission entered into orbit around Mars!

The Indian Space Research Organisation's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also called Mangalyaan (Sanskrit for "Mars Craft"), spent 10 months getting to Mars after it launched. It was mostly a technology demonstration that India's space agency orchestrated to prove they could send a spacecraft to Mars. But it also has some cameras and scientific instruments to collect data about the Red Planet.

India launched its Mars orbiter mission on Nov. 5, 2013 atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle primarily as a demonstration mission to show that the ISRO could build a spacecraft capable of reaching the Red Planet. The $74 million mission was designed to snap photographs of Mars and study the planet's atmosphere for up to 10 months, but did perform science for over a year and continued to orbit the Red Planet through October 2022.

The orbiter's science orbit circled Mars on an extreme path, approaching as close as 227 miles (365 kilometers) and extending as far out as 49,710 miles (80,000 km). It takes the spacecraft about 77 hours to complete one orbit.

• India's First Mars Mission in Pictures
• How India's First Mars Mission Works | Infographic

Why it mattered

The Mars Orbiter Mission, better known as Mangalyaan in India, was a phenomenal feat of engineering for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). With the probe's arrival in Mars orbit, India became just the fourth country to successfully orbit the Red Planet at the time, after the United States, Russia (then the Soviet Union) and the European Space Agency. (The United Arab Emirates and China would follow years later, both in 2021.)

Not only was it India's first Mars mission, but it was the country's first interplanetary mission and achieved on a miniscule budget when compared other Mars missions (NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter, which arrived at the Red Planet within weeks of Mangalyaan, cost an estimated $671 million at liftoff). India was so proud of its Mars orbiter that the country put the spacecraft on a 2000-rupee bank note in 2016.

The Mangalyaan Mars orbiter ultimately spent eight years studying Mars from orbit, capturing detailed images of the Red Planet. Its instruments included a color camera, a thermal infrared sensor, an ultraviolet spectrometer and a mass spectrometer to study (both to study particles in the Martian atmosphere).

In October 2022, ISRO lost contact with its Mars orbiter, likely because it had run out of fuel keep its solar arrays aimed at the sun to generate power.

"The mission will be ever-regarded as a remarkable technological and scientific feat in the history of planetary exploration," ISRO officials said at the end of the mission.

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Mars may have been a much wetter and more geologically active world than it is today, with water repeatedly coursing through its rocks in different forms, a new study suggests.

The discovery comes from a region along the edge of Mars' Jezero Crater known as the Margin Unit. NASA's Perseverance rover has been exploring the area since 2023, and its observations reveal evidence of at least three distinct episodes of water interacting with Martian rocks — including one involving hot groundwater circulating beneath the ancient surface, according to a statement from the space agency.

The Margin Unit region hugs the inner edge of the crater and was identified through observations from orbit. Scientists initially expected Perseverance to encounter sedimentary rocks deposited along the shoreline of the ancient lake that once filled Jezero.

Instead, the rover found igneous rocks that originally formed from molten material deep underground or through volcanic activity. That unexpected geology preserved an intricate record of water activity.

"Before we arrived at the Margin Unit, the main hypothesis — derived from orbital observations — was that the carbonate seen from orbit formed from interaction with the lake that existed in Jezero Crater," Candice Bedford, lead author of the study and a research scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, said in the statement. "But now we know that this location became a sort of crossroads for aqueous systems. The Margin Unit findings are important because Jezero Crater sits inside one of the largest exposures of carbonate on Mars, so what we learn here reaches well beyond this crater."

Using Perseverance's SuperCam instrument, researchers analyzed more than 185 bedrock targets across the Margin Unit. They found evidence that water altered the rocks during multiple episodes.

During the first episode, carbon-dioxide-rich groundwater reacted with olivine, a mineral that formed as magma slowly cooled. The reaction produced carbonate minerals within fractures in the rock.

A later episode appears to have involved Jezero's ancient lake. Some of the rocks contain silica, which can form when olivine reacts with water and is particularly abundant in rocks that were once below the lake's waterline.

Then came a third, hotter episode. Mineral veins containing calcium sulfate and fluorite formed in the eastern Margin Unit, suggesting that hot water once circulated through the volcanic rocks.

On Earth, hydrothermal systems can create environments capable of supporting microbial life, making these ancient Martian water systems particularly interesting to scientists investigating the Red Planet's past habitability.

While the researchers are able to reconstruct the sequence of these episodes, they cannot yet determine exactly when each occurred. However, the order of events suggests the Margin Unit was more than simply an ancient lakeshore. It was a place where groundwater, surface water and heated fluids interacted with Martian rocks, potentially preserving a complex record of how Mars' environment evolved over time — one that the carbonate minerals in these rocks could help scientists use to determine when and where Mars may once have provided conditions suitable for life.

"If there is one thing I have learned after 10 years working with Mars rovers, it is that Mars constantly throws surprises at you," Bedford said in the statement. "It is very rare that things are as we expect them to be from orbital data. I hope this work helps reshape how scientists view the history of water in Jezero Crater and across Mars. Ultimately, I hope it helps planetary scientists reconstruct the changing climate and habitability of early Mars."

Their findings were published September 21 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Jello molds aren't just for dinner parties — when humans start building habitats on Mars, the structures could be made partly of gelatin and yeast.

A team of engineers devised a recipe for concrete that uses yeast and gelatin to bind together sand into a light, porous material. Theoretically, this should work with Mars material, or regolith, as well. In the lab, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology environmental engineer Ning Liu and colleagues already built tiny versions of future Martian habitats using the substance.

And in fact, the researchers say this biology-based concrete could be easier to use on Mars than some other options that have been proposed. Still, there's a long way to go and a lot of technological hurdles to overcome before we're ready to build a Mars base out of yeast.

Welcome to Mars; don't eat the habitat

Like regular concrete, Liu and colleagues' version uses sand or crushed rock as an aggregate: the solid stuff that's held together by material called binder (usually something like Portland cement, a powder of heated limestone and clay mixed with a little gypsum). Water turns the binder into a gel-like glue, and as it dries, the whole binder-and-aggregate mixture hardens into something solid and reasonably strong. But instead of good old Portland cement, Liu and colleagues use a mix of pork gelatin (the same stuff that makes jello) and genetically engineered yeast.

The researchers swapped a couple of key genes in their special strain of the yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae. One gene makes the cells bind more tightly to each other, and the other produces what are called "mussel foot proteins," or the adhesives that help mussels latch onto rocks.

In the lab, Liu and colleagues 3D-printed their concrete creation in cold, low-pressure conditions meant to mimic the surface of Mars; they also tried a version that involved casting the yeast-based material in a mold, the classic way to manipulate gelatin.

As the yeasty mixture cures — over about 48 hours at -67 degrees Fahrenheit, or -55 degrees Celsius, and 0.000 atmospheres of air pressure, if you're looking for the recipe — the water in it freezes and then sublimates. This leaves behind a light and porous, but remarkably strong, scaffolding of gelatin, crushed regolith and yeast proteins. Those proteins act as very strong anchors between the gelatin binder and the rocky aggregate, "creating a bond that is stronger than the bulk material," Liu and colleagues write in their recent paper.

How strong is the substance? Well, the 1.77-inch-tall and 1.18-inch-wide (4.5-centimeter-tall, 3-centimeter-wide) domes Liu and colleagues built have a compressive strength of about 12 megapascals, which is roughly on par with low-grade concrete. It can also withstand bending forces of up to about 6 megapascals.

"This is actually strong enough to build a one- or two-story building on Earth, whose gravity is three times that of Mars. So you can probably easily build a multistory building on Mars with the material," Hong Kong University engineer Jishen Qiu, the study's senior author, said in a statement. "We are confident in scaling it up."

Mars habitats are going to need more than just study walls, though; they also need to shield astronauts from radiation, keep breathable air inside and maintain air pressure against a near-vacuum outside. A concrete dome, no matter how strong, can't do all of that on its own.

The yeast-and-gelatin-based concrete is "best regarded as a printable and recyclable in situ structural component," as Liu and colleagues put it, "not as a complete airtight, pressure-retaining, or radiation-shielding habitat envelope by itself." A real Mars habitat dome would probably need a structure with several layers: inflatable or pre-fabricated pressure modules, airtight liners or coatings and seals, a water-filled radiation-shielding layer — and possibly a concrete structure bound together by genetically engineered yeast.

A long way to go

It's going to take more research before engineers can be sure that yeast will even survive well enough on Mars to help assemble anything with it at all.

Mars is bitterly cold, and its thin atmosphere and long-dead magnetic field leave the surface open to deadly radiation (both from the sun and from deep space). But just as Liu and colleagues modified parts of P. cerevisiae's genome to make it a better concrete binder, other researchers may be able to tweak the yeast to withstand higher doses of radiation and colder temperatures.

"In principle, this platform can be engineered for stress tolerance traits, including resistance to cold, vacuum, and even radiation," the researchers wrote in their paper.

Of course, a yeast that can survive on Mars is … well, a yeast that can survive on Mars, which could actually risk contaminating the planet with hardy and fast-multiplying Earth microbes. Liu and colleagues mentioned in their paper that planetary protection strategies would be an important part of future research, along with testing the material's long-term durability and how well it retains heat.

But the gelatin-and-yeast concrete could offer some advantages over some of the other leading ideas for making building materials on Mars, most of which rely on heating and melting regolith to form bricks and support beams. Those methods get around the challenges of shipping materials from home, but they still require tremendous amounts of energy to use, not to mention industrial equipment that is, in the researchers' words, "difficult to scale with rocket-transportable systems."

Liu and colleagues' approach uses an order of magnitude less energy than traditional regolith-melting methods, they estimate. But building anything substantial on would still require shipping tons of materials from Earth, Qiu estimates.

When it comes to building a home for humanity on Mars, there are never going to be any easy answers. On the other hand, the yeast could be a renewable and re-usable resource that only needs to be delivered once. When astronauts are finished with one building, they can recycle the concrete and put the yeast into a bioreactor to grow a fresh batch.

"It would surprise me if materials for future Martian engineering will not be as diverse as those used in Earth engineering — and biology will certainly contribute," said Qiu.

Liu and colleagues published their work in the journal Chem Circularity.

Astronauts could travel back to Earth from Mars using rocket fuel converted directly from the carbon dioxide in the Red Planet's atmosphere, using a technique known as electrochemical reduction, a recent study reports.

It's an old method involving electrolysis, which is the application of an electrical current to drive a chemical reaction, but the new trick produces methane pure enough to be used as liquid propellant. (A number of rocket engines these days burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane — including the Raptors that power Starship, the rocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity get to Mars.)

"The work we're doing is basically taking CO2 and using electricity to convert it into carbon-containing fuels and chemicals," said Carter Racine in a statement. Racine is a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University and a member of the study team, which was led by University of Mississippi chemical engineer Ahmed Badreldin.

"You can't bring up everything you need [on Mars] from Earth, because every additional kilogram adds enormous cost and complexity to launch and escape Earth's gravity," added Badreldin. "So the question becomes, How do we make the fuels and chemicals needed for space exploration from the resources already available at the destination?"

One answer is electrochemical reduction, which takes place in an electrolyzer, with electrons flowing from the negatively charged anode to the positively charged cathode. Water at the anode is oxidized, meaning it loses an electron, which is transferred to the carbon dioxide at the cathode, where one of its atoms gains an electron and becomes what chemists refer to as "reduced" (meaning its oxidation state is lowered). It can then react with the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that have split from the oxidized water molecules.

The anode contains a catalyst, and the choice of material for the catalyst dictates what carbon-based compounds are produced when the reduced carbon reacts with the hydrogen and oxygen. For example, a gold catalyst leads to the production of carbon monoxide (CO), while copper produces more complex compounds including alcohols, ethanol and methane (CH4).

What makes the work of Badreldin's team stand apart from previous experiments is that they have developed a nanometer-scale copper catalyst doped in nitrogen that is able to produce nearly pure methane.

Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide has been used to produce methane before, in applications on Earth. The problem is, those methods have produced a lot of byproducts alongside methane. On Earth we have complex equipment that separates the methane from the other unwanted compounds, but astronauts are not going to be able to take such unwieldy devices to Mars when every kilogram counts. That's a problem, because for methane to be used as a liquid propellant in rocket fuel it needs to be pure.

However, the specific copper catalyst used by Badreldin's team is able to preferentially produce methane over other compounds, thereby creating it pure without having to refine it. And there's plenty of carbon dioxide available on Mars to use: While Mars' atmosphere is thin, it is nonetheless composed of 96% carbon dioxide.

Even if astronauts never go to Mars, the usefulness of this technique on Earth is clear. Rather than drilling for this natural gas, we can create methane from the carbon dioxide already in our atmosphere.

"We want to do that because right now many of these carbon-based products ultimately come from virgin fossil resources," said Racine. "If we can make them using captured CO2 and renewable electricity, it could reduce reliance on virgin fossil carbon and help close the carbon cycle."

Consequently, electrochemical reduction has also been suggested for use on Earth as a carbon sequestration technique, drawing carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere where it acts as an unwanted greenhouse gas.

The problem with that is, converting carbon dioxide into methane to be burned as a fuel simply releases that carbon dioxide straight back into the atmosphere in a net-zero cycle. Ideally, we want to lock that carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere for a long period of time, but Badreldin doesn't think the technology is ready yet.

"What we are ultimately interested in is seeing whether we can move beyond simply recycling CO2 and toward pathways that are net-negative," he said. "That means using CO2 as a carbon source while converting it into products where the carbon is stored or used long enough that it is not immediately released back into the atmosphere."

It should be noted that the best way to alleviate climate change is to cease burning all fossil fuels, including methane. However, using methane created from electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction in a net-zero process rather than drilling for it could help during the transition from fossil fuels to renewable resources.

The study reporting this research was published in April in the journal ACS Catalysis.

Is that a footprint on Mars? Sorry to burst your bubble, but no. However, scientists have found a strange feature unlike anything they've seen before on the Red Planet's surface.

What is it?

While NASA's Perseverance rover is the newest addition to the agency's robotic Red Planet fleet, its cousin Curiosity is still going strong and finding strange and unusual things on Mars 14 years after landing.

In new observations captured on Mars' Mount Sharp, the Curiosity team has identified "features unlike quite anything we have seen in the past," Michelle Minitti, deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), said in a statement.

These mysterious features are a bunch of broad, shallow pits scattered across the Martian bedrock.

Why is it incredible?

While little pits and divots are common to find on the Martian surface, these wide, shallow pits that researchers saw with Curiosity are quite different from surface features that have been seen before.

"The pits of this week were much broader and shallower than past features and were not accompanied by obvious objects that were once in the pits," Minitti said.

The team collected as much data as they could on the strange pits using Curiosity's various instruments, including MAHLI, the Mastcam camera, ChemCam (the Chemistry and Camera complex) and APX (Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer).

They have so far found interesting layers in the pit material that seems chemically different from the main bedrock.

But we will have to wait and see what else researchers might be able to learn about these odd pits. How did they form? How long have they existed? What can they tell us about the history of Mars?

Rocket Lab still holds out hope that it can build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency picked Blue Origin for that job earlier this month, awarding Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company $700 million to develop, launch and operate the Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN).

Today (Sept. 11), however, Rocket Lab announced that it has challenged that decision, filing a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

"NASA's award decision appears to be inconsistent with the eligibility criteria mandated by Congress. In addition, the agency’s punitive review of Rocket Lab's technical volume was inconsistent, making incorrect assertions and conclusions," Rocket Lab said today in an X post that laid out its argument.

"Procurement standards exist to ensure fair competition and protect public investment," the California-based company added. "We are pursuing this review to ensure those standards are upheld for critical infrastructure that will underpin American exploration at Mars for decades to come."

As its name suggests, the MTN orbiter will serve as a communications link between mission controllers here on Earth and other NASA spacecraft studying the Red Planet. Just two agency orbiters fulfill that relay role these days, and both are quite old: Mars Odyssey launched in 2001, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifted off in 2005.

NASA had been eyeing a new Mars telecom orbiter for years and finally got Congressional funding for it in July 2025 — $700 million, to be precise. The agency issued a request for proposals this past May, drawing considerable interest from the private sector.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were widely considered the front-runners, and NASA ended up going with Blue. The award calls for the company to deliver MTN (which, despite the "network" in its name, is a single spacecraft) to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028. It's expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

Blue Origin has been in Rocket Lab's shoes before, and has behaved similarly. Bezos' company filed a protest with the GAO in 2021 after NASA picked SpaceX to provide the first crewed moon lander for the agency's Artemis program.

The GAO denied the protest in July of that year. Blue Origin then sued NASA but lost in court in November 2021. The story has a happy ending for the company, however: NASA decided to select a second Artemis lander as well, and Blue Origin won that contract in 2023. We'll see how this story plays out for Rocket Lab...

Are those purple, wavy, alien thumbprints? Or perhaps an otherworldly ocean? Nope! It's actually a dune field on Mars, colored purple.

What is it?

Across the Martian surface are all sorts of unique features in the rocky, dusty surface material. In this false-color image, snapped by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, you can see the incredible and strange ripples of a dune field on Mars.

"Our science goal for this observation is to observe any changes from a previous image we acquired in 2011," a statement sharing the image reads. "For this footprint, the target enlarged and centered more over the dune field, which is located on the floor in the northern half of an unnamed impact crater."

Why is it incredible?

Spacecraft like MRO, with its HiRISE camera, have opened our eyes to the incredible features across the Martian surface.

From dune fields like we see here to craters and ancient riverbeds, these views have helped scientists piece together the planet's incredible, dynamic history. For decades, observations from orbit around Mars and by rovers on the planet's surface have helped to solve at least part of the mystery of what Mars was once like.

Researchers are still looking for signs that unequivocally point to life once existing on the planet. But so far, observations have showed that, billions of years in the past, Mars had abundant surface water — lakes, rivers perhaps even a huge ocean. In analyzing the material in and near ancient waterways on the planet with NASA's Perseverance rover, researchers have already found evidence that could possibly link to biosignatures.

While this image might look like a strange but beautiful purple-colored desktop background, photos like it this can be essential clues for scientists hunting for answers.

China is making progress on its Tianwen 3 Mars sample return mission, which aims to bring back to Earth roughly 500 grams (17.6 ounces) of Red Planet collectibles in 2031.

According to the China National Space Administration, the Tianwen 3 mission will have a lander, an ascender, a service capsule, an orbiter and an Earth reentry module.

If all goes to plan, Tianwen 3 will launch in 2028 on two Long March 5 heavy-lift rockets from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on the island of Hainan, China's southernmost province.

Sputnik moment

"The Tianwen 3 mission is progressing smoothly, with intensified efforts being made to overcome technical challenges," Hou Zengqian, the mission's chief scientist, recently told CCTV, a state-run Chinese broadcaster.

"The probe equipment has entered the prototype development phase, and scientifically, many scientist teams from across the country are working together to tackle the challenges in accordance with the mission's scientific objectives," Hou added.

Meanwhile, NASA's plans for hauling Mars samples to Earth are murky at the moment. So China appears to be in the lead to notch a major space milestone.

"If accurate, this represents a Sputnik moment," said former NASA "Mars Czar" Scott Hubbard, referring to the reported Tianwen 3 progress.

"China will not only grab the headlines but may be the first to find evidence of life on another planet," Hubbard, who also previously directed NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told Space.com.

Top scientific priority

"The Tianwen 3 mission will look for microbial traces potentially similar to early forms of life on Earth, while also taking into consideration the possibility of unknown forms of life that may have emerged through Mars' unique evolutionary history, providing crucial evidence to answer this major scientific question," Hou told the state-run Xinhua news agency in a recent interview.

Searching for potential signs of life on Mars is the top scientific goal of the Tianwen 3 mission, Hou said on Sept. 3 during the 2026 International Deep Space Exploration Conference on, which was held in Hefei, the capital of eastern China's Anhui Province.

Landing site

China's Mars sample-return trek will be launched "around 2028" on two Long March 5 rockets departing from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China's southernmost island province of Hainan. (Launch windows for Mars missions come around just once every 26 months. The next one opens in November-December of this year, and the one after that, which Tianwen 3 apparently is targeting, runs from December 2028 to January 2029.)

Hou also said China expects to finalize the landing site for the mission by the end of 2026, with Chinese specialists advancing work on a next-generation geological map of Mars in its entirety.

If everything goes according to plan, the mission will collect samples from the Martian surface and then send them back to Earth around 2031.

"Regardless of whether signs of life are found, the returned Martian samples will have irreplaceable scientific value," Hou said.

Tackle the challenges

Hou added that analyses of the returned samples at microscopic, molecular and isotopic scales could deepen our understanding of Mars' geology and environment, as well as the evolution of habitability and the conditions under which life may originate.

According to Hou, Mars sample return is an extremely complex project, with landing-site selection, planetary protection and contamination control, and the identification of potential signs of life among its key challenges.

Chinese Mars researchers are selecting candidate landing sites for the mission based on factors that include geological age, history of water activity, habitability and the potential for preserving biosignatures.

Planetary protection lab

Xinhua reported last month that a "planetary protection laboratory" is to be built in the first phase of Hefei's Deep-Space Science City in east China's Anhui Province, citing the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL).

"The planetary protection laboratory will implement a two-way protection system that guards both the returning Martian samples and Earth's biosphere," Xinhua reports.

The lab's tasks encompass sample sterilization, unsealing, processing and biological risk assessment. "The facility is designed to support the implementation of major deep-space missions and to enable scientific research on Martian samples," added Xinhua.

China "will follow the planetary protection policies of the Committee on Space Research, to prevent biological contamination of Mars by terrestrial organisms and to protect Earth from any potential extraterrestrial life forms that may be carried back in the samples," said Li Hang, director of the development planning department at DSEL, according to Xinhua.

You can view a video about China's Mars sample return plans here.

Blue Origin will build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency announced on Tuesday (Sept. 1) that it has selected Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company to develop the $700 million Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN), which is expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

"The award marks a milestone in NASA's strategy to expand communications and navigation services beyond Earth and the moon, establishing the foundation for sustained exploration of Mars in the coming decades," NASA officials said in a statement on Tuesday.

As its name suggests, the MTN — previously known as the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter — will primarily serve to aid NASA science missions rather than gather data of its own.

The MTN is "a next-generation communications system that will enable reliable, high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for current and future Mars missions," NASA officials said in the statement.

The need for such a data-relay craft is expected to become acute in the coming years as NASA's fleet of current Mars orbiters ages and the agency works to prepare the Red Planet ground for crewed missions in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

At the moment, just two NASA orbiters relay data and commands between the agency's Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers and their handlers on Earth — Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2001 and 2005, respectively. The European Space Agency's Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft help out as well.

All four of these orbiters are gathering science data of their own, however. The MTN will not have a split focus; it will be a dedicated communications craft.

NASA got $700 million for a Mars telecom orbiter in July 2025, when Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill. The agency laid out requirements for the spacecraft in February of this year, then issued a request for proposals in May.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were viewed as the front-runners for the contract, and both pushed hard for it, touting their bona fides and expertise.

Blue Origin won out in the end, however. The company will base MTN on its Blue Ring spacecraft platform, which it describes as "an all-in-one, high-powered hybrid solar electric and chemical propelled spacecraft that provides unmatched mission maneuverability, versatility, and capacity at dramatically lower profile costs."

Blue Ring has not flown a mission yet, but a prototype version of it went to space on the first-ever launch of Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn rocket in January 2025. Though Blue Ring can fly on other rockets as well, MTN will presumably launch on a New Glenn; the newly announced NASA contract calls for Blue Origin to "design, develop, integrate, launch and operate" the Mars telecom mission.

The contract calls for Blue Origin to deliver the spacecraft to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028.

NASA's next big space telescope is not only meant to unlock some of the mysteries of dark energy. It also is a pioneer in the naming of missions.

Scientific American recently said that the observatory, which launched on Aug. 30, is the first ever space telescope ever named after a real-life woman: American astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who supported development of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope and was NASA's first head of astronomy in the 1960s.

The story is very different when it comes to men. For example, NASA's "Great Observatories," which launched between 1990 and 2003, were all named after famous U.S. male astronomers or physicists: the Hubble Space Telescope (Edwin Hubble), the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (Arthur Compton), the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (Lyman Spitzer).

Indeed, relatively few spacecraft of any kind have borne female names over the years — and most of the ones that did were not honoring actual, real-life people.

For instance, a number of missions with female names took them from mythology (e.g., NASA's Europa Clipper and China's Chang'e moon probes). Others used female names not attached to particular individuals (such as NASA's Clementine moon mission, and the European Space Agency's LISA, which is an acronym for "Laser Intraferometer Space Antenna.")

A notable exception is Sojourner, the mini-rover on NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander mission that was made famous again by the 2015 film "The Martian;" it's named after Sojourner Truth, a Civil War-era abolitionist. Sojourner's name was selected in 1995 from a worldwide naming contest for students and suggested by 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Some other notable examples of missions honoring real-life women include:

• ESA's long-delayed ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, which is now set to launch to Mars in 2028. It's named after a British scientist who contributed to discovering the structure of DNA. (Part of the rover's mission is to analyze potential biosignatures on the Red Planet's surface.)
• The Cygnus International Space Station (ISS) resupply program, which is managed by Northrop Grumman. Multiple Cygnus freighters have been named after female NASA astronauts, including Janice E. Voss, Sally Ride and Kalpana Chawla, and one of them honored the American mathematician and "hidden figure" Katherine Johnson.
• Satellogic's ÑuSat/NewSat series. It has commonly named satellites after female historical figures in science, such as Black American chemist Alice Ball, Polish physicist-chemist Marie Curie and Australian radio astronomer Ruby Payne-Scott.
• Canada's GHGSat has a program in which employees name the company's Earth-orbiting satellites after family members, which has generated names from real-life people like Eleonore and Penny.
• The U.S. Space Force nicknamed its GPS III Space Vehicle-08 "Ms. Creola Katherine Johnson," another nod to the mathematician

What this means

Throughout history, the names of ocean-going ships — ships on the water, not spaceships — often have associations with women. The U.K.'s Imperial War Museums (IWM) suggests that women's names are used due to two traditions. The first is that, very generally speaking, the word "boat" is a "female" word in some languages that use gendered nouns, but that is by far not universal, even among the imperial sailing powers of the 1400s to 1600s.

The second association, which seems more likely, is the notion of a mother, goddess or similar "female figure" guiding a crew, which we see in theaters right now with "The Odyssey:" Athena helps Odysseus, reflecting the ancient Greek epic story. (For example, figureheads — sculptures on sailing ship prows — were often, although not always, carved in the likeness of women, Royal Museums Greenwich states.)

There are famous sailing ships with female names that many Americans can cite, such as the nicknames for the three Spanish ships — the Niña, Pinta and Santa María — used by Christopher Columbus during his famed first voyage to the New World in 1492.

"There's always been a tradition to name ships — and oftentimes after women," Valerie Neal, emerita curator in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's department of space history, told Space.com. Neal's research includes extensive work on female astronauts.

The U.S. space program has historically leaned upon mythological names of both genders for its missions, she noted, citing the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo human spaceflight programs as examples of male monikers. These days, Neal added, the education system is less tilted toward introducing children to old Greek or Roman myths, which may explain why it's now more common to name missions after real-life individuals.

In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, "there was a big debate at the time of the space shuttle naming whether to name the space shuttles after historic figures, or after concepts," Neal said. "One idea was even after Native American tribes." (For example, Tafuna High School in American Samoa recommended the name "Hōkūle'a" for shuttle, as noted in NASA's 1991 monograph "From Ship to Shuttle: NASA Orbiter-Naming Program")

The space shuttles were ultimately named Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour after "historic ships of exploration," Neal said. You can read more about the origins of those names in this piece by The Space Foundation.

The Cygnus spacecraft "USS Janice Voss," which flew to the ISS in 2014, was the first U.S. orbital mission known to Neal to be named after a woman. "She had had an affiliation with the Orbital Sciences Corporation, and so they wanted to honor her," said Neal, referring to a previous company that managed the Cygnus program.

The flock of Cygnuses named after women — at least six of them, according to Neal — is "a good sign that people are starting to think of contemporary figures, or more contemporary, [and] naming spacecraft as a tribute to them, and to their contributions in science and exploration and discovery."

Naming a flagship space telescope after Nancy Grace Roman is another good sign, of course. And choosing her for this honor makes sense; she was in "a class by herself — because her name is so directly associated with astronomy and large space telescopes" like Hubble, Neal said.

"It is recognizing her significance in the history of space exploration as a leader who made so much possible, through her own work as an astronomer, but then as an administrator and manager at NASA made possible the orbiting solar observatories, the orbiting astronomical observatories — and then Hubble and the other great observatories that followed."

Roman's name on the telescope, she added, is "elevated" because "her name coincides exactly with the spacecraft and its purpose, whereas the names of the astronauts that are attached to the [ISS] resupply missions … not all of them had any connection to the International Space Station. Several did, but not all."

Neal said she's hopeful that more women will see their names attached to space missions, including both those historical astronomers who saw "their bosses were getting all the credit" as well as the numerous non-male scientists making impacts in the field today.

"I think it's entirely possible that, in time, there will be another major observatory named for a woman," Neal added. She noted that recommendations from the science community every 10 years form the basis of new space missions, and that the next such "decadal survey" in astrophysics is expected to wrap up around 2030.

In the nearer term, NASA is considering ideas such as an ultraviolet telescope, an advanced X-ray imaging satellite, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory for launch in the 2030s or early 2040s, presenting more opportunities to attach female names to flagship space missions.

Sidebar: Female mission names

With thousands of flown or planned missions to space, and numerous parts making up each spacecraft, it is difficult to compile a comprehensive list of probes or instruments that have had female names. The following is therefore a partial list, though an extensive one. In no particular order, it includes:

• Telescopes/observatories: NASA's Roman, ESA's Gaia, NASA's Pandora, the British-American Ariel V telescope, ESA's NewAthena, ESA's Ariel, ESA's LISA, NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
• Human spacecraft: Mercury Aurora 7, SpaceX's Crew Dragon Grace.
• Satellites/ISS missions: ESRO-1A and 1B's nicknames of Aurora and Boreas, multiple Cygnus ISS resupply spacecraft, much of the Satellogic NuSat/NewSat constellation, several GHGSat spacecraft, Space Force's GPS III Space Vehicle-08 (nicknamed Ms. Creola Katherine Johnson), and the Russian Resurs-DK1 satellite's multinational cosmic-ray module PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics).
• Moon: China's Chang'e series, the Soviet Union's Luna series, NASA's Artemis program and missions, Intuitive Machines' IM-2 lander Athena, JAXA's Selene/Kaguya, NASA's Clementine, the NASA ARTEMIS moon-orbiting probe.
• Venus: ESA's Venus Express, the Soviet Union's Venera series.
• Mars: ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover, NASA's Sojourner rover, JAXA's failed Nozomi orbiter.
• Jupiter/moons: NASA's Juno, NASA's Europa Clipper.
• Asteroids: NASA's Lucy, ESA's Hera.
• Other hardware: Some spacecraft/rocket parts have female names (e.g. the US military's Juno II rocket, Firefly Aerospace's Miranda engine, ESA's Europa and Ariane rockets).

The following at first glance appear to have female names, but either were not confirmed before this story's deadline or were confirmed to have other origins:

• Japan's MUSES Program (Mu Space Engineering Spacecraft), which may or may not reflect the English/Ancient Greek meaning of goddesses of knowledge.
• DoD's ALEXIS (the Array of Low Energy X-ray Imaging Sensors) and JAXA's Akatasuki (Venus Climate Orbiter) may not just reflect female names.
• NASA's Uhuru, which is not named after the female "Star Trek: The Original Series" character but after the Swahili term for "freedom."
• NASA's Dawn is meant to reflect the solar system's beginning, and not a person.
• The Soviet Vega series to Venus is meant to be VeGa, or as National Geographic once wrote, "a contraction of the Russian words for your dual targets, Venera and Gallei."

New research into the interior of Mars further emphasizes that the Red Planet is a world of two very different halves.

Deep inside the southern hemisphere of Mars, the temperature is up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius) warmer than beneath the northern hemisphere, deepening the mystery of the strange dichotomy between the Red Planet's flattened north and craggy southern highlands.

"Scientists usually assume that the interiors of planetary bodies are generally spherically symmetric, but this is not necessarily true," said Alexander Berne, formerly of Caltech and now at the University of Arizona, in a statement. Berne is the lead author of a new research paper revealing the discovery of the strange southern hotspot.

Berne and his team went back and looked at archival data from three NASA spacecraft – Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – to look for subtle changes in their orbital velocity that might reflect variations in Mars's gravitational field. Using a technique developed by Berne called 'tidal tomography' that also accounts for the sun's varying gravitational influence on Mars as the Red Planet progresses around its elliptical orbit, he and his team were able to infer a model of the interior structure and temperature of Mars.

How the gravitational field that the various spacecraft experienced changed over time differs substantially from what would be expected were Mars's interior perfectly spherically symmetrical. To explain this difference, the mantle beneath Mars's southern hemisphere must be between 390 and 750 degrees Fahrenheit (200 and 400 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mantle in the north, and indeed it is so warm that it could still be partially molten. This could have repercussions for both Mars's habitability and how long Mars remained volcanically active.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Mars's interior is different in the south compared to the north, because we already know that its surface is asymmetrical. The north of Mars is characterized by lowland plains, while the planet's crust in the south is on average 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) thicker than in the north and is covered by cratered highlands. The northern lowlands may have once been home to a large ocean.

"The dichotomy that we see between north and south is important to understand because it gives information about processes that may have influenced the hydrology of Mars, including the formation of basins that may have held water," said Caltech's Amirhossein Bagheri, who is the second author of the research.

A hotter southern mantle could also explain some other puzzling discoveries on Mars. NASA's InSight lander, which ended its mission in December 2022 and which had a seismometer on board, found that seismic waves dissipate more quickly in the south, which can be explained by the hotter temperature there. Additionally, magnetic anomalies found in iron-bearing minerals in the south now make more sense.

Today, Mars lacks a global magnetic field, but over four billion years ago it had one. If upwelling from a warmer southern mantle heated the crust in excess of the 'Curie temperature', which is the temperature at which materials lose their inherent magnetic properties and any residual magnetism in them is induced, it could have resulted in creating the mysterious magnetic remnants in the iron-bearing minerals.

"Understanding the interior structure of planetary bodies helps us unravel the processes that shaped their formation and evolution," said Berne, although the origin of Mars's north–south divide is still up in the air. It's not even clear whether the surface differences have the same causes as the interior differences.

The leading contender is that it's all the result of an ancient giant impact over four billion years ago and that the northern lowlands are therefore actually an enormous impact basin. By gouging out a huge hole in the north, the impact would have facilitated the release of a lot of internal heat, allowing the northern mantle to cool faster than the south.

Alternatively, the thicker crust in the south could have proven to be an efficient lid, preventing the leaking of much heat from the mantle. This can actually be tested – magma upwelling would have stalled as it encountered the thick, dense crust, creating melt intrusions beneath the surface that could be inferred in higher-resolution gravity data.

These are questions for future missions, but the tidal tomography technique could be employed for other worlds too, from Mercury to the large moons of Jupiter.

"As we get more gravity data, we can determine the three-dimensional intricacies of a planet's interior structure," said Berne. "These inferences in turn give us a blueprint for designing future missions and scientific exploration of these worlds."

The discovery of Mars's thermal anomaly was reported on Aug. 27 in Nature.

One of NASA's intrepid Mars rovers has notched another impressive milestone during its exploration of the Red Planet.

What is it?

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its Mastcam camera to capture a panorama made up of 323 individual images. The images were taken on Aug. 1 and Aug. 2, 2026, the 4,972nd and 4,973rd Martian days (or sols) of the rover's mission, just as Curiosity notched a total of 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) of elevation gain throughout its now 14-year exploration of the Red Planet.

The images show the wide expanse of a broad valley nicknamed "Valle Grande," a depression on the side of Mars' Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer) mountain the rover has been climbing since 2014. The valley's floor and northern rim can be seen in the distance.

Why is it incredible?

Curiosity's mission has been incredible for a number of reasons. For one, the daring "sky crane" maneuver that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used to land the SUV-sized robot on the Red Planet changed Mars landings forever.

Since then, Curiosity has discovered clues that liquid water once flowed across the surface of Mars and has found tantalizing evidence of complex organic molecules on the Red Planet, including some that scientists consider to be the "building blocks" of life.

And even after 14 years of traveling across the Red Planet and suffering considerable damage to its wheels, NASA says Curiosity has plenty of exploration and science left to conduct.

Another one of NASA's Mars rovers, Perseverance, recently notched a travel milestone of its own when it surpassed 26.2 miles (42.2 km) of travel  — the length of a marathon  — across the Martian surface.

No GPS available in space? A satellite experiment may have a solution for that.

NASA's Starling mission — made up of a swarm of four cubesats in low Earth orbit (LEO) — is testing out navigation by using other satellites as moving landmarks. The hope is that this tech will allow future missions to navigate if GPS is not available.

The three-year-old tech demo will be extended beyond its previous expiration date this year until at least 2028, NASA announced on Monday (Aug. 17). The aim is to get the most out of the onboard experiment, a collaboration with industry partner EraDrive called FALCON (short for "Fast Autonomous Lost-in-space Catalog-based Optical Navigation").

"As NASA prepares for more missions beyond Earth's orbit, technologies like FALCON can support lunar satellite swarms, distributed science missions and human exploration," NASA officials said in Monday's statement.

While NASA's applications are civilian, alternative GPS solutions are also being investigated by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) out of concern that the limited number of GPS satellites could be vulnerable to adversaries. Earlier this year, for example, Space Force entities SpaceWERX and Space Systems Command jointly launched an initiative aiming for new ideas for "positioning, navigation and timing" (PNT) capabilities in space.

The aim of FALCON, however, is to deal with sheer distance. While satellites in Earth orbit have ample access to purpose-built navigational markers such as GPS, that access rapidly thins out as missions go farther afield. And this isn't just an abstract concern; NASA aims to send astronauts to the surface of the moon again as soon as 2028 on the Artemis IV mission, as part of a larger effort to build a moon base.

Industry and the military are also very interested in the moon and the area around it, known as cislunar space — and how best to navigate in the new environment. The moon's orbit also introduces complications to navigation; in 2025, for example, Canada's Outer Space Institute reported that "mass concentrations," or mascons, pull down on orbiting satellites and may affect their pathway, in some cases even inducing crashes into the lunar surface.

But before testing at the moon, NASA wants to learn more closer to home. It partnered with EraDrive, an autonomous spacecraft navigation company that originated with a group at Stanford University, which provided flight software and algorithms for FALCON. The experiment uses data from Starling's cameras, as well as a catalog on the spacecraft that charts thousands of known satellites and space objects around it.

The mission not only is trying out "GPS-independent navigation" but is also showcasing space situational awareness, or SSA — that is, the ability to understand the environment around the spacecraft (including other satellites). Some other spacecraft, like SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites, use SSA to automatically dodge threats of space debris in LEO.

Starling's team is hoping to bring even more capabilities for navigation and SSA. "The results from FALCON can have far-reaching implications for on-orbit space-traffic monitoring, collision avoidance and alternative navigation," Roger Hunter, program manager for NASA's small spacecraft and distributed systems program, said in the statement.

FALCON notched two major milestones in its first three years. For PNT, the spacecraft used its cameras to observe other satellites and objects — and to match their information with the onboard database, which includes roughly 20,000 objects from publicly available DoD records. "FALCON then used the observed and verified objects as reference points to determine Starling's orbit," NASA stated.

FALCON's in-orbit observations also helped mission managers better understand the pathways of 200 individual objects, beyond the orbital estimates in the DoD catalog. The estimating work was performed over just three days and autonomously, meaning ground operators did not participate.

"The self-orbit determination capability made possible through FALCON is a first for spacecraft using optical cameras, to navigate by their relative position to other objects in space," NASA stated. "Separately, the catalog-update experiments produced better object position predictions onboard Starling than those provided by ground stations."

Starling's four spacecraft operate at an altitude of about 350 miles (565 km), which is about 6 miles (10 km) higher than originally planned. That's because SpaceX advised mission managers that Starling's mission plan put it at risk of coming close to Starlink satellites already operating in an orbital shell at 340 miles (555 km), according to Space News. By comparison, the International Space Station typically orbits slightly lower than Starling or Starlink, at 250 miles (400 km).

All of which is to say that the Starling mission demonstrates operations in crowded conditions. But in the future, NASA is hoping to port the lessons learned to the moon and Mars for science applications — meaning, to improve measurements from spacecraft — as well as for interplanetary traffic management.

The world just got its first good looks at some hardware that will make spaceflight history.

Last Thursday (Aug. 13), Japan unveiled the spacecraft that make up its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which aims to snag samples of the Mars moon Phobos and haul them to Earth — something that has never been done.

The big reveal came at Tanegashima Space Center, the site from which MMX will launch toward the Red Planet atop an H3 rocket. And we just got some clarity about when that liftoff will take place.

If all goes according to plan, MMX will launch on Oct. 19 at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT; 4:41 a.m. on Oct. 20 Japan time), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on Thursday (Aug. 20). That's the first day of the mission's launch window, which extends through Nov. 7.

JAXA originally intended to launch MMX in 2024 but had to stand down due to issues with the H3. Mars and Earth align properly for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months, so this was a significant delay.

MMX will spend about a year traveling to Mars. Once in orbit around the Red Planet, the mission will map and study its two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are just 14 miles (22 kilometers) and 7.5 miles (12 km) wide, respectively.

Part of this work will help the mission team pick a landing site on Phobos, where they'll drop a 55-pound (25 kilograms) French-German rover called Idefix. That little robot — which is named after the dog in the French comic "Asterix" — will study Phobos' surface in detail using a variety of instruments.

The MMX spacecraft itself will then spiral down toward Phobos, eventually making contact and collecting about 0.35 ounces (10 grams) of material. MMX will leave Mars orbit with these samples in 2030 and deliver them to Earth for analysis a year later.

The mission aims to shed light on the nature and origin of Phobos and Deimos.

"Understanding how Mars and the two moons formed is a heavily debated topic in solar system science," JAXA officials wrote in a mission description.

"Remote-sensing observations by the MMX spacecraft and the detailed analyses of the returned sample will determine whether Phobos and Deimos are remnants of early Mars created from debris produced by a giant impact with the young planet, or whether the moons are asteroids captured by Mars's gravity that brought material from outer solar system," they added.

To date, no spacecraft has returned material from the Mars system. Russia tried to do so with its Phobos-Grunt mission, which aimed to sample the eponymous Red Planet moon, but that effort failed shortly after its November 2011 launch. (The Soviet Union also launched two probes to Phobos in 1988, but neither one of them met its mission objectives.)

NASA plans to collect and haul home pristine samples that have already been collected on the Martian surface by its Perseverance rover, but it's unclear when or if that will happen. The agency has deemed its original sample-return architecture too expensive and is currently investigating other options.

There are good reasons to believe that Japan will succeed where others have failed, however. The country has a history of small-body sample-return success; its Hayabusa mission brought home pieces of the asteroid Itokawa in June 2010, and Hayabusa2 did the same with material from the space rock Ryugu in December 2020.

Europe's Mars Express orbiter has captured new, stunning imagery flying low over a geological region of the Red Planet shaped by ancient waterflow billions of years ago.

Mars Express launched in 2003 and is operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). It's equipped with the High Resolution Stereo Camera, which scans multiple points of perspective across regions of Mars' surface to create 3D color renderings. During a low pass on the spacecraft's highly elliptical orbit, Mars Express flew over the planet's Southern Highlands and Schiaparelli Crater — one of Mars' largest impact sites.

Schiaparelli Crater is located in a heavily cratered region of Mars' Southern Highlands, where a wetter and warmer climate supported water flows that shaped the planet's geography 3.7 billion years ago, according to ESA's Mars Express video. Schiaparelli measures more than 285 miles (460 km) across, and has a bit of fictional fame. The crater happens to be the site where astronaut character Mark Watney gets stranded in Andy Weir's "The Martian". It also shares a namesake with ESA's real-life Schiaparelli Mars lander, which crashed on Mars' surface in 2016 (but wasn't headed for Schiaparelli Crater).

Both are named for Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910), who made detailed observations of Mars during the planet's closest approach in 1877. Schiaparelli created a map of "canali," Italian for "channels," he saw as dark lines across its surface, which he assumed were filled with water. That was later mistranslated by English-speaking astronomers as "canals," leading to speculation about intelligent life on Mars constructing artificial structures.

Though that hypothesis for Mars' surface features was disproven by later astronomers (to date, there have been no discoveries on Mars that suggest intelligent life once lived there), it has since been discovered that Mars once did have active bodies of water on its surface. Schiarapelli's contributions to the astronomical field were significant enough to land him the honor of a Martian crater in his name.

Despite its massive diameter, Schiaparelli is considered shallow compared to other Martian craters its size. It was once much deeper, but sediment deposited by wind and ancient water flows, volcanic eruptions and asteroid impact debris have filled the crater over the last several billion years.

In addition to showcasing Mars Express' new footage, the ESA video also provides an explanation for how the satellite uses its High Resolution Stereo Camera to observe five simultaneous viewing angles over a four-color spectrum as it flies low over the planet. The low-orbit passes allow Mars Express to capture swaths of 3D data that span hundreds to thousands of miles long and dozens of miles across. Those are then stitched together to form more complete regional maps, which can be added to scientists' increasingly complex model of the entire Martian globe.

People around the world enjoyed stellar views with last week's total solar eclipse.

And the day after we looked up to see the moon obscuring out sun, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover looked up to see its own Martian solar eclipse.

What is it?

Solar eclipses aren't unique to Earth. In theory, any planet with at least one orbiting moon would have times where that moon might eclipse some part of its sun to anyone looking up from the planet's surface.

On Aug. 13, 2026, one day after Earth's total solar eclipse in which our moon temporarily blocked out our sun for skywatchers in some locations, Mars saw its own solar eclipse.

Looking up with its left Mastcam-Z camera, Perseverance snapped this image of one of Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, partially eclipsing the sun. This appears to be Phobos — the larger of the pair — eclipsing the sun.

Why is it incredible?

So far, we humans have only directly had vantage points on Earth, in Earth orbit and on the moon. We have not yet landed humans on Mars, and it remains unclear how long it might be before that happens.

But robotic explorers like Perseverance allow us to travel where we can't go ourselves. Such travelers have taken us into interstellar space and all throughout our solar system. From Saturn's rings to Neptune's distant, icy neighborhood, robotic probes have allowed humanity's reach to stretch far through the cosmos.

And thanks to Perseverance and its two "eyes," the two Mastcam-Z cameras located high on its mast, we can travel right to the surface of Mars, look up and see an alien solar eclipse. What an amazing thing that is.

On Aug. 17, 1877, American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered Mars's moon Phobos.

Moons of Mars: Amazing Photos of Phobos and Deimos

Hall was working at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. and looking through a 26-inch refractor telescope — which was then the largest in the world — when he first spotted the moon. Six days earlier, he had discovered another, smaller moon that he first described as "a faint star near Mars."

Upon further inspection, not only did he realize that this star was actually the Martian moon Deimos, but he also discovered a second, larger moon now known as Phobos. He announced both discoveries the following day, on Aug. 18, 1877.

Phobos is the largest moon of Mars. Its dimensions measure 10 by 14 by 11 miles (17 by 22 by 18 kilometers) across and orbits Mars three times each Martian day at a distance of about 3,700 miles (6,000 km).

Why it mattered

Over the century and a half since this discovery, there has been an enormous amount of scientific progress in the study of Mars. In addition to many decades of studying the planet from afar, we have seen a variety of different orbiters and rovers explore the Red Planet over the past few decades. We have sampled bits of Martian material, seen up-close photos of the planet and the rocks which scatter across its surface. It might be easy to take for granted how much we know about our planetary neighbor, and this 19th century discovery was groundbreaking.

As we look to the future with new technologies and new discoveries on the horizon, it is important to also look backward to see and understand the history and work that made all of this progress possible.

A radiation-shielding vest might one day protect astronauts from dangerous, random outbursts from the sun, a new study finds.

More than 50 years after the final Apollo mission, NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon. To succeed, this project must protect astronauts from solar radiation, especially the intense and unpredictable radiation from solar storms. Coating an entire spacecraft with a meaningfully thick layer of radiation shielding remains impractical due to weight constraints, but wrapping astronauts in protective garments may potentially be helpful.

In the new study, researchers experimented with the AstroRad vest, which was designed by the Israeli startup StemRad with support from the Israel Space Agency and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. The garment was created to protect astronauts from explosions from the sun known as solar particle events.

"Radiation in space is unavoidable, and a single major solar particle event can make a substantial contribution to an astronaut's lifetime risk of radiation-induced cancer," study co-author Oren Milstein, CEO and co-founder of StemRad, told Space.com. "By significantly reducing that contribution, personal shielding could be particularly important for future lunar and Mars missions."

When it comes to protection against radiation, lead is excellent at blocking hazardous forms of light, such as X-rays and gamma rays. However, lead is much less effective at defending against the kinds of dangerous particles that can hurtle through space. For instance, when fast high-energy electrons known as beta particles strike dense lead atoms, they can trigger a shower of X-rays that are more harmful than the beta particles themselves. And if neutrons strike lead atoms, they can knock loose a spray of neutrons from the atoms' nuclei, worsening the impact from the radiation.

Instead, AstroRad relies on a high-density plastic rich in hydrogen. Among the elements, hydrogen possesses the highest density of electrons per atom, which can help create a dense shield to protect against incoming particles. At the same time, hydrogen atoms normally do not have neutrons, so if neutrons hit them, they cannot generate the kind of dangerous neutron sprays that can happen with lead atoms.

Moreover, the plastic in AstroRad is much lighter than lead. This makes it easier to move around in garments incorporating the plastic, and more practical for space missions in which weight is a major limitation.

The scientists combined thousands of hexagonal rods of the rigid plastic together like scales to create a flexible garment. All in all, each vest weighed about 57 pounds (26 kilograms).

The scientists developed a vest rather than a full-body suit or a helmet because "different organs and tissues have very different sensitivities to radiation, so shielding every part of the body equally is not the most effective approach," study co-author Jordan Houri, lead scientist for space exploration at StemRad, told Space.com. "At the same time, a full-body suit would be much harder to put on and move around in."

The shielding thickness of the AstroRad vest was based on how sensitive to radiation the underlying organs were. This strategy provides about a 30% greater reduction in the dose of radiation a person receives compared with distributing the same amount of shielding uniformly across the body, Houri said.

The researchers tested their vest during NASA's uncrewed Artemis I moon mission in late 2022 using a pair of extraordinarily complex dummies called phantoms. These artificial torsos were constructed of plastics that mimicked the density of human tissue, bone and organs, and each was equipped with more than 5,600 radiation sensors on and in them.

The two phantoms were designed to be adult females, since previous research found that breasts and ovaries are especially susceptible to radiation damage.

"Women are predicted to face a higher risk of radiation-induced cancer," Milstein said. "Targeted shielding could help narrow that difference in risk between male and female astronauts."

Since the phantoms mimicked women, they were given women's names, Zohar and Helga. "Helga was contributed to the experiment by the German Aerospace Center, and Helga is a traditional German name," Milstein said. "Zohar was contributed by the Israel Space Agency, which selected the name through a public outreach campaign. Zohar is a traditional Hebrew name meaning 'radiance,' which we thought was particularly fitting."

Zohar and Helga flew seated in NASA's Orion spacecraft; Zohar was equipped with an AstroRad vest, while Helga was not. Although Orion did not encounter a significant solar outburst during its 26-day mission to lunar orbit and back, the researchers were able to extrapolate how much solar radiation astronauts might experience based on what the phantoms encountered passing through the inner Van Allen belt of radiation surrounding Earth.

When the scientists analyzed past solar particle events, they found the AstroRad vest would have significantly reduced the dose of radiation a person during those outbursts — for instance, by nearly 60% for a solar particle event that happened in August 1972.

"We had originally anticipated something closer to 45%, so when we first saw the result, we thought we needed to go back and find an error," Houri said. "Instead, the detailed analysis showed that AstroRad's approach of providing targeted shielding to the most radiation-sensitive organs and tissues was even more effective than we had projected."

Such a reduction could spare astronauts the equivalent of up to 193 days of deep-space radiation exposure. "The most important implication is that AstroRad could help overcome one of the major health challenges limiting long-duration human exploration beyond Earth," Milstein said.

AstroRad is not something astronauts would wear continuously throughout an entire mission, Houri said. "AstroRad was developed as an emergency countermeasure for solar particle events, so astronauts would only wear it when radiation levels are elevated, typically for periods of hours or days," he explained.

Still, "although it is not something astronauts would need to wear throughout an entire mission, we designed the vest to remain usable for many hours at a time," Milstein said. During tests with the vests on the International Space Station, "several crew members even slept with it on."

The level of radiation protection the AstroRad vest provided was similar to that supplied by the Orion spacecraft's onboard storm shelter, "while allowing the astronaut wearing it to leave the shelter and continue mission-critical tasks," Houri said. "AstroRad can be used on its own or together with a shelter, but one of its main advantages is that an astronaut can remain protected while moving around the cabin and carrying out essential mission operations rather than remaining inside the shelter."

The scientists are now investigating whether it is possible to manufacture radiation shielding in space using onboard materials. For instance, in collaboration with Florida aerospace company Redwire, "we have already demonstrated that it is possible to 3D-print AstroRad components from recycled polyethylene aboard the International Space Station," Milstein said.

The scientists detailed their findings online today (Aug. 12) in the journal Science Advances.