Could Martian mudstones be holding evidence of ancient microbes? New findings strengthen the case that the Red Planet once held life.

New data from NASA's Perseverance rover has revealed complex carbon in two Martian mudstones found in Mars' Jezero crater, the same location where previous evidence of possible ancient life has been found. Scientists think this macromolecular (meaning large) complex carbon, could hold evidence that ancient microbial life once existed in the same sedimentary material, according to one new paper describing these observations. "Measurements of two mudstones show hundreds of organic detections, making this the most robust organic detection in Jezero crater," the paper reads.

This comes soon after the news last year that Perseverance found what has been dubbed the strongest evidence of potential biosignatures, or hints of life, on Mars.

"Carbon is the primary building block for life on Earth, and all living things are made up of complex organic macromolecules," co-lead author Ashley Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute, told Space.com. "On Earth, [macromolecular carbon] is often found in extremely old rocks and in some cases it is the only organic evidence of past microbial life.

"Since early Mars may have been more similar to Earth," Murphy added, "we may anticipate finding [macromolecular carbon] in old Martian rocks too, so we are searching for these organic macromolecules on Mars and other planetary bodies to determine whether the necessary chemical ingredients and environmental conditions to support life have ever existed there."

Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021 in Jezero Crater, an expansive crater thought to once be a lake that could have possibly harbored life. This landing site was in fact chosen because scientists thought it could have some of the best evidence for possible ancient life on the planet. And so far, in Perseverance's extensive explorations — which have now officially taken the rover the distance of a marathon on Mars — that prediction seems like it's turning out to be true.

In this new research, a team of scientists co-led by Murphy used Perseverance's spectrometer SHERLOC (the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), which uses lasers to identify an area or object's chemical and mineral makeup, to map the distribution of organic matter in the individual mudstones. The crew found organic carbon inside two mudstones.

Furthermore, these carbon-filled mudstones were found in the same location as the last year's discovery of a potential biosignature found in a sedimentary rock on the Red Planet, which scientists say is still the strongest evidence that life could have once existed on early Mars. In this discovery, Perseverance found a rock now-named "Cheyava Falls" with distinctive "leopard spots."

These types of rock marking can be created in high heat or extremely acidic temperatures, but neither of these conditions are thought to have existed in the area. However, the markings can also be formed by the presence of life. So, while this rock wasn't conclusive evidence of past life on Mars, it certainly provided significant evidence that is now supported by this new data.

With these observations, the rover has made two main findings.

First, Perseverance has found organic, large, complex carbon in mudstones in Bright Angel, a rocky area on the northern and southern edges of Neretva Vallis, which is an ancient river valley in the Jezero area. And not only did Perseverance make hundreds of detections of organic carbon in these rocks, but the researchers also state that this is "the only detection of macromolecular carbon on a natural rock surface on Mars."

"This is also the first detection of MMC in a mudstone on Mars outside of Gale Crater, suggesting that the availability of organics may have been widespread across the planet billions of years ago," co-lead author Kyle Uckert, the SHERLOC deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com.

While both studied mudstones have organic carbon in their interiors, according to these observations from Perseverance, there were some differences between the two rocks. The carbon in one mudstone was found mixed with primarily silicate minerals, while the other was filled with carbon mixed with secondary carbonate and sulfate minerals. The team also found that the carbon in both rocks was relatively intact, meaning the specimens might be resistant to radiation and oxidation or that it may have been recently exposed to the Martian surface.

Secondly, the team found that, in this identified carbon, Perseverance has detected evidence of potential biochemical interactions. These interactions left behind features in the two mudstones that look just like features created by microscopic life in sediments on Earth. This begs the question: Did ancient microbes on Mars really live in the sediments in this once-flowing river?

Maybe, maybe not. While that would certainly be one explanation, it's also possible that the carbon could have been created without life.

"There are multiple potential pathways to form abiotic organics on Mars," the authors state in this paper, clarifying that this, even compounded with other existing data, cannot conclusively say whether or not life created what Perseverance has observed.

"The science payload of the Perseverance rover was not designed to distinguish between abiotic and biotic processes, but was instead selected to identify compelling rocks to be collected for possible return to Earth for more rigorous testing," Uckert told Space.com. Uckert added that there could be many non-life reasons behind the presence of this complex carbon, "for example, it may have been delivered to the surface via meteoritic infall, or formed through hydrothermal geologic processes," he said.

For now, we can only wait until the next juicy bit of evidence about ancient life on Mars reveals itself.

This work was described in a paper published June 24 in the journal Science Advances.

The head of the European Space Agency has issued a wakeup call to decision makers amid partners cancelling missions and geopolitical changes affecting the space sector, calling for Europeans to be pilots rather than passengers.

In a LinkedIn post published last month, European Space Agency (ESA) Director General Josef Aschbacher stated that recent decisions taken by the United States to pause the lunar Gateway station and cancel the Mars Sample Return mission campaign — both major projects with deep ESA commitments — have revealed how dependent the agency is on outside actions.

"Europe has become too exposed to decisions beyond its control," Aschbacher wrote, before laying out the challenge the continent faces. "The choice before Europe is clear: Do we pilot, or are we merely passengers?"

The situation for ESA and its 23 member states is complex, requiring Europe to both develop agency and autonomy while balancing this with fruitful collaboration, Aschbacher noted.

"The current environment demands both diversified international partnerships and strengthened autonomous capabilities," he wrote. "Only under these conditions can Europe decide when to act independently and when to cooperate globally, protecting our investments and our industrial base amid geopolitical uncertainty."

With trust in the U.S. as a reliable partner taking a hit, collaboration with other space actors such as Japan, South Korea and Australia could grow, while Europe also pursues its own capabilities.

Human spaceflight is one area Aschbacher is keen to push Europe forward, describing it as a necessity rather than a luxury, and one needed to secure ESA's freedom to unlock the "scientific, economic, strategic and geopolitical benefits of space and to inspire a new generation to shape Europe's future."

The question is not new — it has long been debated by European policy makers and the space sector — but recent events and Aschbacher's comments have brought the issue to the fore. And there is clear support and grounds for greater European autonomy in space.

"The disruption brought by the Trump administration has made this question more pressing," said Marco Aliberti, associate manager and lead on international engagement at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) in Vienna, an independent think tank that advises European space policymakers. "There is a realization in Europe that so far we have not been pursuing autonomy."

Europe, Aliberti argued, has built genuine technical capacity, including the ability to build and operate world-class space systems, but, at the same time, has consistently failed to secure the political autonomy to decide how and with whom those capabilities are deployed.

"Participation without agency is yet another form of dependency dressed up as ambition," he said. In other words, Europe has built the capacity to execute in space, but not the autonomy to decide its own agenda.

Aliberti pointed out that this is not the first time Europe has needed to move to acquire greater autonomy. The birth of Europe's Ariane rocket in the 1970s was a response to an asymmetric relationship. The United States refused to launch the Franco-German Symphonie communications satellite unless Europe agreed to forgo commercial use, with the aim of protecting American dominance in commercial communications. European governments concluded they had no choice but to build their own launch capability.

Aliberti went on to point out that history could, potentially, repeat itself, this time in the lunar realm, as a European partner dependent on U.S. transportation could face unacceptable conditions. "The U.S. may tell us: I will continue bringing you to the lunar surface, provided that you do not engage in commercial activity," he said. "We do not see the risks that being a passenger entails."

And investment in space can bring huge payoffs. For example, NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contracts in the 2000s gave early funding to SpaceX, enabling the development of the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, and ultimately, the rise of its Starlink broadband megaconstellation.

"It was the billions that NASA gave to SpaceX that enabled the birth and growth of SpaceX," Aliberti stated. "Let's not neglect the impact that space exploration investment has across other parts of the ecosystem."

ESA's DG has signaled the need for action and its urgency, although he admitted it will take years to build autonomous capability. "If not now, then when? If not ESA, then who?" Aschbacher asked.

What comes next is unclear. Institutionally, Aschbacher sees opportunities in a convergence of key meetings and milestones, including an ESA Council in mid-June, a ministerial focused specifically on exploration scheduled for December, and the crucial once-every-three-years ESA Ministerial Council in 2028. At the same time, the European Union, with a growing interest in space separate to ESA, is drafting its Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028-2034.

Aliberti warned that, if ESA cannot act promptly, its member states could move to act alone to address shorter-term needs. He cited the recent development of the French government reaching an agreement to send a pair of its astronauts on missions with U.S. space station firm Vast.

As confidence in the partnership with the U.S. government erodes, individual European nations may look to explore bilateral arrangements with commercial American providers, meaning less interest in investing into joint European efforts. The window for collective European action is open, but perhaps not for long.

"If we take decisions by the Ministerial Council in 2028, we will be able to play a role and be pilots in 10 years," Aliberti says. "If not, it may become too late."

GOLDEN, Colorado — Scientists are engaged in research with an eye toward transforming the cold climes of Mars into a far more habitable place for Earthlings in the future.

One notion proposed is the dispersion of an aerosol meant to help warm up Mars' atmosphere. The idea is projected to be a first step toward terraforming the Red Planet. Also emerging recently as a new field of study is "applied astrobiology," which seeks to appraise what would be needed to create sustainable habitats and biospheres beyond Earth.

Scientists have drawn up a research blueprint for assessing the viability of warming the Red Planet, outlining what it might take to make Mars a place in space where life can thrive. Importantly, that roadmap does not presuppose that warming Mars is desirable. Rather, its purpose is to identify what is required for Mars to be warmed, what it would cost and what could go wrong.

Keep the option open

Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, detailed the plan here at a Space Resources Roundtable, which was held from June 2 to June 5 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines.

Kite's talk showcased a mission concept prototype to validate aerosol dispersal to warm Mars' atmosphere as a first step toward terraforming the Red Planet.

"Creating sustainable habitats and biospheres beyond Earth is an enormous scientific and technical challenge, but it's one we'll have to surmount if we're going to extend life beyond Earth," Kite told Space.com.

"We do not yet know enough to create a biosphere from scratch," he added. "Applied astrobiology, like planetary science, requires contributions from many disciplines."

Kite said that relatively modest research investments can keep open the option of extending life beyond Earth as the scientific exploration of Mars continues.

The roadmap, Kite explained to Space.com, identifies several approaches to warming Mars. Solid-state greenhouse membranes, he said, offer the nearest-term benefits, with direct applications to moisture farming and life support at human bases on Mars.

Strengthening Mars' natural greenhouse effect might warm large regions of the globe, Kite noted, although many aspects remain to be worked out. Each approach carries scientific and technical risks that research must address, he added.

A centuries-long process

Whether Mars can support a biosphere, however, is unknown. But, if activated, a biosphere on Mars would help sustain large numbers of people in bases beyond Earth, sparking the conditions for a centuries-long process of atmospheric oxygen buildup.

The questions raised by the possibility of warming Mars are numerous. But the immediate unanswered questions are identifiable, Kite suggested, and can be addressed with a focused research campaign.

He acknowledged that a consensus on moving forward requires more data on two fronts: whether Mars could support life in the future, and whether there's life on Mars today.

An approach to warming Mars would be inherently modular, in that it could be done by many sites in parallel, Kite suggested. An aspect of the endeavor may well involve orbiting reflectors for warming intermediate-sized areas, such as human bases.

Prototyping progress

Kite is also a resident researcher at the Berkeley, California-based Astera Institute, which was founded to steer science and technology towards an abundant future. And he's a participating scientist on the mission of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet since August 2012.

Being scoped out by Kite and fellow researchers is a potential technology demonstration on Mars, an automated payload that would test an aerosol release concept. It would discharge less than 2 pounds (about 1 kilogram) of sub-micron artificial particles and laser track that dispersal to an altitude of roughly 1,500 feet (500 meters), to confirm ascent of the plume into the skies of Mars.

Kite said that dispenser requirements are particularly challenging. For example, researchers will need to show that it works on Earth before launching a demonstration mission to Mars.

There has been "prototyping progress," Kite said, with an experimental setup designed and built for rapid deployment.

To trial-run the particle dispersal concept and plume tracking technology, the plan calls for use of NASA's Planetary Aeolian Laboratory (PAL) at Ames Research Center in California this year. PAL is a unique facility used to support experiments under different planetary atmospheric environments, including Earth, Mars and Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Filling big gaps

To help evaluate the feasibility of terraforming Mars, Kite points to the need for better maps of subsurface water ice on that world; climate-monitoring orbiters to observe the planet's natural variability; the return of Red Planet samples to Earth for study; and international cooperation.

"Mars sample return will be done by China's space agency. The original plan for their Tianwen-3 mission was to grab some rocks from wherever and then head back to Earth," Kite said. "The new plan is to go around with a helicopter and collect rocks from a wide area. I'm hopeful that they share their Martian samples, allowing all the world's labs to have a crack at them."

Then there's the prospect of an International Mars Ice Mapper, Kite said, a proposed Mars orbiter that's been studied by NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). However, that mission appears at this moment to have been shelved.

"It's a good idea and could always come back," said Kite. "We should search for deep aquifers using electromagnetic soundings — that's the best strategy. We don't know whether there's still liquid water deep underground. There are big gaps in our knowledge about Mars."

Demonstrations on Mars

Kite reported that warming Mars with artificial aerosol appears feasible, backed by workshops about creating a "Green Mars" and applied astrobiology.

If early findings from aerosol release demonstrations on Mars prove positive, Kite said, those results would provide the quantitative basis for "government-scale programs" to evaluate whether extending habitable conditions beyond Earth is achievable, at what cost and on what timescale.

"Even under optimistic assumptions, warming at kilometer scale is at least a decade away, and wider environmental modification would require sustained investment over many decades beyond that," states the recent research paper, which Kite led.

"Relatively modest research investments would keep open the option of extending life beyond Earth as Mars’ scientific exploration continues," Kite and his colleagues concluded.

NASA has announced a new commercial partnership for the next satellite headed to the Red Planet.

California-based Relativity Space will design, build and launch the spacecraft that carries NASA's Aeolus instrument suite to orbit around Mars, where the probe will be the first to provide daily measurements of the planet's global environment. Aeolus will collect data on Martian dust and cloud cover, winds and temperatures, according to a NASA release.

"Public-private partnerships like this are a force multiplier for science," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement on Wednesday (June 17).

The newly announced relationship, and others between NASA and private industry, is designed to allow the agency to concentrate its resources on important science discovery. "By pairing NASA’s world‑class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars," Isaacman said.

Aeolus consists of four instruments, designed to work in tandem to create a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its behavior. In addition to refining scientific models for the Martian environment, NASA plans to use the data to reduce risks to future robotic and crewed missions landing on Mars' surface.

The science suite includes the Doppler Wind and Temperature Sounder (DWTS‑Ozone), in collaboration with GATS, designed to measure wind speeds and temperatures present up to 37 miles (60 kilometers) above the ground. The Thermal Limb Sounder (TLS), designed with Xiomas Technologies, will create vertical temperature profiles and provide data on atmospheric dust and cloud cover, while the Surface Radiometric Sensor Package (SuRSeP) collects compositional data on those clouds and dust, and tracks how the Martian surface absorbs, stores and releases energy, like heat. Finally, Aeolus' Wide‑Field Context Camera (WFCC) will take daily images to assess atmospheric activity across the whole of Mars.

NASA is targeting 2028 for the launch of the Aeolus mission, which will be designed and built at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, where it will also be integrated on Relativity's spacecraft for testing ahead of launch. NASA has committed to support Aeolus' scientific operations for at least one Martian year (approximately 687 Earth days). However, the agency has historically extended its missions to Mars, when able.

NASA was recently forced to end operations of its MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) probe around Mars, after an anomaly led to a loss of communications with the satellite, but the spacecraft ran for more than a decade beyond its original one-year mission. The agency's only two active satellites orbiting the Red Planet are the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey, which are both operating nearly two decades or more, respectively, beyond their initial mission timelines.

For its part, Relativity will be in charge of designing the Mars-bound spacecraft and will also be responsible for launch and for satellite operations in space. The company's pathfinder launch vehicle, the Terran 1 rocket, lifted off for the first and only time in March 2023, but it failed to reach orbit. The company then pivoted to development of the bigger, partially reusable Terran R rocket, which is expected to debut sometime later this year. Eric Schmidt, who served as Google CEO from 2001 to 2011, was appointed to lead Relativity in March 2025.

Last year, NASA's Lucy spacecraft encountered a bi-lobed asteroid that is a chunk of an even larger rocky body that was smashed apart in an almighty collision 155 million years ago. This little pitstop happened on Lucy's way to a rendezvous with the Trojan asteroids that shadow Jupiter around the sun.

The asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, better known as "DJ" to Lucy's mission scientists and named after the paleoanthropologist who discovered the Lucy hominin fossil in Ethiopia in 1974, orbits the sun in the inner part of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The true Lucy fossil dates back in time 3.2 million years and is an important link in the evolutionary chain that led to homo sapiens. Likewise, primitive asteroidal bodies are somewhat like fossilized remnants of the building blocks of the solar system's planets, including Earth. Understanding the make-up of these asteroids and where they formed versus where they are now can provide crucial insights into how Earth was assembled and where its organic materials and water may have come from.

Lucy flew past DJ in April of 2025. It is a pretty primitive asteroid, meaning that it has, or once upon a time had, certain volatile materials such as water-ice, as well as plenty of carbon — all things that can be removed thermally over time. Most objects that contain volatiles originate in the outer solar system, where it is cold enough that the volatiles do not sublimate away.

Within DJ's composition, Lucy detected iron-bearing phyllosilicates, which are a mineral formed in the presence of liquid water.

"Phyllosilicates are an indication that water was present and there was some degree of aqueous alteration," Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist from the South-west Research Institute and lead of the study into DJ, told Space.com.

However, for DJ to have had water, it must have formed further out from the sun, possibly in the outer asteroid belt.

"But DJ belongs to the inner asteroid belt so that's already intriguing," said Marchi.

The spectral evidence also indicates DJ was only partially altered by water, which Marchi says tells us something about its history.

"The aqueous alteration terminated early, and though we don't know why, we can speculate. In order to have aqueous alteration there needs to be some internal heating [usually via radioactive elements] and if something forms later than everything else then there will be less heat [since many of the radioactive elements will have already decayed]. Or perhaps there was just less water to start with where it formed."

What we do know is that DJ was once part of a much larger asteroid that suffered a giant impact 155 million years ago, causing the parent body to break apart into a number of chunks, the largest being the 45-mile-wide (73-kilometer-wide) asteroid 163 Erigone. Consequently, the remains of this parent asteroid, including DJ, are collectively referred to as the Erigone family.

DJ's violent origin may also explain its shape, which features two lobes joined together by a narrower and relatively smooth neck.

"We have now seen many small bodies in the solar system that appear to have this bi-lobed shape, and that's across a wide range of sizes," said Marchi.

For example the near-Earth asteroids 25142 Itokawa, which was visited by the first Japanese Hayabusa mission in 2005, and 4149 Toutatis that was encountered by China's Chang'e 2 in 2012, are both bi-lobed. So too is the tiny asteroid Selam, which is a satellite of the asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh visited by Lucy in 2023. Then there are cometary bodies including 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko visited by the Rosetta mission and comet 19P/Borrelly, imaged by NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft in 1999.

These objects are all different sizes, different types and in different locations, but they all share the same structure. However, Marchi cautions that they might not all form the same way. For example, the neck between the lobes of comets such as 67P might form through erosion via sublimation and outgassing as the comet gets closer to the Sun, whereas for asteroids it might indicate a history of being involved in a giant impact, the resulting fragments coming together to be bound by gravity – a so-called contact binary.

Lucy now continues onwards, scheduled to encounter its first trojan asteroid, known as 3548 Eurybates, in August 2027. Trojans are asteroids that have been captured by Jupiter's gravity at the L3 and L4 Lagrange points, 60 degrees in front and 60 degrees behind Jupiter itself.

"We think that the Trojans, based on our understanding of the solar system, formed further out and then were captured where they are today following the early shuffling of the planets," said Marchi. "This shuffling could also have been the origin of DJ, so there could be a connection there between DJ and the Trojans."

Compositionally, the majority of trojans are expected to be even more primitive than DJ, containing more carbon, water and other volatile materials that would sublimate if they got too close to the sun.

That is all except one: Eurybates.

"It is the only one of our targets that from spectroscopy appears to be relatively similar to DJ. It's not identical, but it is closer in composition to DJ than the other Trojans, so it will be intriguing to compare them," said Marchi.

Indeed, any similarities will help tell us how asteroids were herded around during the first few hundred million years of solar system history following the formation of the planets. Jupiter and Saturn, especially, began migrating inwards and then out again. In doing so, their gravity pushed and pulled minor bodies all over the place, as did the gravity of Uranus and particularly Neptune as they edged outwards. These migrations led to the formation of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, and ejected trillions of bodies into the wide orbits of the Oort Cloud.

"The key question is, if DJ has been relocated in the inner asteroid belt, then how many other asteroids came along with it and ended up being closer to the Earth, where they could have delivered some water, some organics and other things to our planet?" asked Marchi.

Lucy will visit six of Jupiter's trojans, which in total number over 15,300 discovered so far. Far from lumps of rock, the trojans, along with DJ and Dinkinesh (which is the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossil), are windows into the past, and the storytellers of the Earth's most ancient history.

Lucy's findings from Donaldjohanson were published on Thursday (June 18) in the journal Science.

It's always a treat to be reminded that we have spacecraft orbiting Mars right now, and a new image from one of these Red Planet probes does just that.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express has beamed to Earth a beautiful view of a region on Mars known as Mamers Valles. This is a sweeping valley system that stretches across nearly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) of land. And if your day is feeling a little dry, there's a little game you can play while looking at the image.

I spy 30 dust devils hidden in the crevices of these Martian valleys.

What are we looking at?

Dust devils are basically small tornadoes that pick up dust as they whirl around. They're common on Earth and on Mars: Rovers and orbiters have imaged these phenomena many times on the Red Planet. One time, for instance, a mission team tracked about 1,000 of them speeding across the Red Planet. Another time, NASA's Perseverance rover watched two of these devils merge into one large devil. We've even heard them "crackle" before, thanks to another Perseverance video.

Mars' dust devils are far larger than those of Earth, reaching heights of almost 5 miles (8 km) and sometimes racing at speeds of about 148 feet (45 meters) per second.

In the image below, you can see the full picture of the valleys; the devils, ESA says, are small yellow dots with pinkish trailing shadows. You can try to spot the devils on your own, but if you need some help, ESA has outlined precisely where each one is just here.

Why is it noteworthy?

Scientists are so interested in Martian dust devils because they help map the planet's otherwise invisible wind. That can aid in future Mars mission planning as well as helping researchers decode the general Red Planet environment— information that could lead to discoveries about Mars' watery past or its evolution through time.

But besides dust devils, the region depicted in the image, Mamers Valles, is worth admiring, too.

Thanks to its vastness, Mamers Valles actually connects Mars' ancient southern highlands with its northern lowlands, according to an ESA statement. Plus, all around the valleys of this 3.8-billion-year-old area lie many other land features — including what used to be full-on glaciers. Now covered in debris, these glaciers should hold water ice underneath, which would be a great target for a future Mars mission to explore.

As for when that future mission could take off, only time (and probably the success of NASA's Artemis program) will tell.

Could you run a marathon on Mars? And also — would you want to?

NASA's Perseverance rover just completed an off-Earth marathon: It has now traveled more than 26.2 miles (42.2 kilometers) across the Martian landscape after landing in February 2021, according to the mission team. The only other rover to complete a marathon on the Red Planet is Opportunity, which took over 11 years to traverse the distance. But as NASA looks toward potentially landing humans on the Red Planet some day, it makes me wonder: What would it be like to complete a marathon on Mars … on foot?

Here on Earth, I have run a few marathons — in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Florida, I've managed to wheeze, sweat, and drag my feet over the finish line. You'll never catch me on the leaderboard, but I've felt all the unique stings and challenges of the race. From the unexpected charley horses to the mental hurdles you overcome, no marathon is easy. But on Mars? We're not comparing humans to rovers, and Perseverance has spent these past five-plue years not just traveling but exploring and conducting scientific investigations. But if we imagine a future where we successfully send humans to Mars, let's explore what it might really be like to travel 26.2 miles on foot across the Red Planet.

Mars is brutal

For starters, Mars is cold. And while completing a marathon is difficult at any temperature, the cold presents unique challenges, like aggravating breathing troubles and causing your joints to stiffen. The freezing temperatures that you'd find on Mars could certainly pose a challenge for joints and muscles, and depending on how cold it is, sweating due to physical exertion in extreme cold could even increase your risk of hypothermia.

Mars' atmosphere is very thin, so heat from the sun escapes very quickly on the Red Planet. And because Mars is millions of miles farther from the sun than Earth, temperatures on the surface can plummet to as low as minus 225 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 153 degrees Celsius).

That's not to say it's always that cold. If you stood exactly on Mars' equator at noon, you could feel soothing, springtime temperatures of up to 70 degrees F (20 degrees C), according to NASA. But generally speaking, the surface of Mars is quite cold.

A heavy weight

Mars' air isn't breathable, either; it's about 95% carbon dioxide. So you'd have to walk around in a spacesuit, meaning you'd never feel those spring-like temperatures directly anyhow. But you might warm up a bit, carrying the weight of that suit.

While the lower gravity on Mars would help out a bit, current spacesuits and their accompanying life support backpacks weigh well over 200 pounds (90 kilograms), and on Mars they could still weigh close to or over 100 pounds (45 kg), it has been reported. We don't yet know how future astronaut suits will be built or how much they might weigh, but if we assume they will be at least fairly similar to previous iterations, they will add a considerable amount of weight as you try to maneuver across the Martian surface.

Completing a marathon in athletic clothing and sneakers is a monumental challenge in and of itself. I can only imagine that attempting such a feat (however slowly) in a spacesuit would be incredibly difficult and take an extraordinary amount of energy, strength, stamina and time.

The good(ish) news

There is one thing about traveling 26.2 miles on Mars that would make it easier than on Earth: the gravity. On Mars, a human would experience 62.5% less gravity than they would on Earth, which would certainly make the marathon a little easier on your joints — spacesuit excluded. However, I can only imagine that between the spacesuit and the lower gravity, covering such a long distance on Mars might be a bit awkward.

And while your joints might be glad for the reduced gravity, that doesn't mean that a Mars trek would be a picnic. Astronauts who complete spacewalks from the International Space Station do so with almost no gravity, but they still report that these excursions are monumentally strenuous and challenging.

"It's a lot of hard work on your muscles, mostly upper torso and arms and hands," NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries previously told Space.com. "You're essentially in an inflated balloon, which creates resistance against your movements. Crew members are notoriously ravenous when they come in from spacewalks."

Boots on Mars

Exploring how astronauts might travel across the Martian surface isn't just a thought experiment. As crewed missions journey to the moon for the first time in over 50 years with NASA's Artemis program, we are once again reminded of the incredible time and hard work that it takes the teams across the agency and its partners to accomplish these missions.

Nevertheless, the space agency is pushing toward not just landing humans back on the lunar surface with Artemis 4, but with grander long-term plans of moon bases and longer residencies on the lunar surface. These efforts are part of an even longer-term plan by the agency, with support from commercial space companies, to one day send humans to Mars.

However soon a crewed flight to Mars may happen, one thing is for sure: it won't be easy.

If some future Mars traveler dares to attempt a marathon, whether walking or even running on the Red Planet, they have their work cut out for them.

Following months of unsuccessful recovery efforts, NASA has officially begun decommissioning the MAVEN orbiter, bringing to a close an 11-year mission that transformed scientists' understanding of Mars and became one of the agency's most valuable assets at the Red Planet.

The decision follows the loss of contact with the spacecraft in December 2025. That loss happened after a routine communications blackout while the probe passed behind Mars. Mission controllers spent months attempting to restore contact, including sending commands designed to reboot the spacecraft's computers, but MAVEN remained silent.

A review board convened by NASA in February found the spacecraft had been operating normally in the weeks leading up to the anomaly. Fragments of telemetry later recovered from recorded radio signals indicated that MAVEN emerged from behind Mars in a safe mode while spinning at roughly 2.7 revolutions per minute — an unexpected state for a spacecraft that was not designed to rotate during normal operations. Investigators found that the rotation likely drained the spacecraft's batteries over several hours, eventually causing its communications system to lose power.

The underlying cause of the anomaly remains unknown, however, and a final report is expected later this year.

"The conclusion is that the spacecraft is not recoverable," Mike Moreau, MAVEN's project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said during a press conference earlier this month. "The team really has experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission."

Yet as scientists mourn the spacecraft, they are also celebrating a mission that far exceeded its original goals.

"The team is certainly broken up about this," said Shannon Curry, MAVEN's principal investigator and a scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. "But at the same time, we are incredibly proud of the science we've accomplished over the last decade."

Launched from Cape Canaveral in November 2013, MAVEN — short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution — arrived at Mars less than a year later as NASA's first mission devoted to understanding the planet's atmosphere. Originally planned to last just two years, the spacecraft was tasked with determining how Mars lost the thick atmosphere that once allowed liquid water to persist on its surface.

Long before MAVEN arrived, scientists knew Mars had not always been the cold, dry world seen today. Ancient river valleys, lake beds, deltas and other geological features pointed to a wetter past, when liquid water flowed across the landscape. For those conditions to exist, Mars would have required a much denser atmosphere than the thin envelope of gas surrounding the planet today.

For more than a decade, MAVEN circled Mars in a highly elliptical orbit, measuring particles escaping into space and observing how the atmosphere responded to solar activity. Among its most significant findings was evidence that solar storms can dramatically accelerate the loss of atmospheric gases, helping explain how Mars evolved from a potentially habitable world into the cold, barren planet seen today.

The mission also discovered new types of planetwide auroras, revealed how global dust storms can accelerate the loss of water from Mars, and provided the first direct observations of atmospheric sputtering, a process in which energetic particles strike the upper atmosphere and eject atoms into space.

"We now have a better understanding of atmospheric escape at Mars than at any other planet, including Earth," Curry said.

Over its lifetime, the mission contributed to more than 800 scientific publications, according to NASA, helping establish the clearest picture yet of the forces that transformed Mars over billions of years.

As NASA's fleet of Mars missions grew, MAVEN's importance came to extend well beyond atmospheric science. Although it supported just over 8% of relay sessions during its lifetime, the spacecraft returned nearly 18% of all science data transmitted from the Martian surface, underscoring its value as a high-capacity communications asset.

The four remaining active orbiters — Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express and the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter — have adjusted operations to compensate, and NASA is exploring a future commercial telecommunications network to help fill the void.

Its loss leaves a noticeable gap in the network, but not an unmanageable one, scientists say.

"There is a slight delay on occasion, because we don't have as many assets in view, to getting our science data back, and MAVEN was critical in returning science data versus operational data," said Tiffany Morgan, the director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "The Mars Relay Network is resilient enough at this point in time to accommodate, for the most part, the loss of MAVEN with the added delay."

The timing of its loss does bring some missed opportunities. MAVEN will no longer be able to complement observations from NASA's ESCAPADE mission, a pair of spacecraft launched last year to further investigate the Martian magnetosphere and atmospheric escape.

Even in retirement, however, MAVEN's story may not be entirely over.

Curry said mission scientists may attempt additional imaging campaigns later this year using cameras aboard Mars rovers, although previous efforts to spot the silent spacecraft from the surface have proven unsuccessful. Beyond offering a final glimpse of the orbiter, any successful observation could provide investigators with additional clues about the spacecraft's final movements.

The spacecraft is expected to remain in orbit around Mars for another 50 to 100 years before atmospheric drag eventually pulls it into the planet's atmosphere, where it will burn up like a shooting star.

Asked what she would write on MAVEN's tombstone, Curry did not hesitate:

"Best. Mars. Mission. Ever."

It's hard to fit everything on a small satellite, especially the fuel, but a new propulsion system could make it easier.

Instead of having separate fuel for chemical thrusters and electrical thrusters, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study suggests that a single propellant can power both kinds of systems. And this idea will get an in-space test soon, if all goes according to plan.

"If you can have chemical and electrical propulsion in one small package, it's the best of both worlds," Amelia Bruno, a former postdoctoral student at MIT who led the new study, said in a university statement on Monday (June 1). "This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform."

The study borrows from fuel research by the U.S. Air Force, and it was partially funded by NASA. The space agency's Green Propulsion Dual Mode cubesat spacecraft will launch no earlier than November to see if the propulsion system and monopropellant, already tested on the ground, also works well in space.

The mission to low Earth-orbit will serve as a valuable demo, the agency stated, for missions that go much farther from our planet — to places such as Mars, the eventual destination for human missions under NASA policy.

"NASA is looking to expand deeper into space to support future agency objectives. Major drivers for these activities include researching and developing new and advanced propulsion systems and capabilities," agency officials wrote of the cubesat mission, which last year was expected to launch in October 2025, according to a SpaceNews report.

The green monopropellant the mission is using, tested in a new MIT study in the Journal of Propulsion and Power, builds upon previous Air Force research. The propellant is called ASCENT, or Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic Propellant. The fuel is marketed as greener, or less toxic, than the usual high-efficiency hydrazine that is perfect for making big maneuvers in space but is dangerous to handle. It's also been tested in space before, during NASA's Green Propellant Infusion Mission in 2019-20 (when the fuel was called AF-M315E; it has since been renamed, according to the Air Force Research Laboratory, which developed it).

What's more, ASCENT — despite being originally envisioned for chemical thrusters that use fuel quickly, during big space moves like orbital insertions — may also be suitable for electrospray thrusters. These thrusters are designed to make smaller, long-term adjustments to a spacecraft's trajectory. The tiny (thumbnail- to dime-sized) thrusters use an electric field to accelerate particles of liquid propellant. The acceleration fires the propellant into space as a spray (hence the name).

The new MIT study appears to show that one fuel could serve different spacecraft needs. Engineers tested how well electrospray thrusters on the ground performed with ASCENT, using a model cubesat set on a testbed that magnetically suspended a device in a vacuum chamber, simulating the free-floating environment of space. The team tried out different voltage levels on the thrusters and examined the spray's ability to maneuver and spin the cubesat.

"Compared to our normal electrospray propellants, ASCENT can provide similar performance in terms of thrust," Bruno said. "Now that we know our thrusters work with ASCENT, we can start thinking of all the ways we can make them even better."

While NASA's focus is on distant destinations, ASCENT could also be repurposed for missions closer to home. Small satellites, for example, could make use of the propellant to save fuel during Earth-observing missions, especially when they're tasked to pivot for a fast-moving weather event.

"Say there's a storm coming, and you'd want to deploy your constellation of small satellites to observe over one location," study co-author Paulo Lozano, director of MIT's space propulsion laboratory, said in the same statement. "You could choose to send them quickly, or slowly, depending on the nature of the observation. And the only way to do that is if you have two propulsion systems, which is now possible."

The Mars graveyard just welcomed another corpse.

On Wednesday (June 3), NASA officially declared its MAVEN orbiter dead, closing the book on a highly successful mission that studied the Red Planet's atmosphere for nearly a dozen years.

The MAVEN team didn't script this ending; the orbiter went dark without warning this past December, and it remained silent despite repeated attempts to hail it. But MAVEN's ultimate fate would have been roughly the same even if its handlers had been able to shut it down in a controlled fashion.

"The nominal plan for disposing of the spacecraft at the end of its mission was just to leave it in that nominal orbit, where it would remain for a period of 50 to 100 years before entering the Martian atmosphere," MAVEN Project Manager Mike Moreau, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said during a press conference on Wednesday.

"So, the spacecraft's basically in a configuration, in an orbit, that's very similar to what it would have been if the mission had ended nominally," he added.

And that's what happens to dead Mars orbiters: They generally keep circling for a half-century or more, until the planet's thin atmosphere drags them down and burns them up. Or the end could come considerably sooner, if they're unlucky enough to slam into one of their brethren or into Phobos or Deimos, the two moons of Mars. (Indeed, MAVEN had to perform a maneuver in February 2017 to avoid a potential collision with Phobos.)

Some of these probes may already have been pulled down, considering the long timeline of Mars exploration. Here's a brief rundown of the orbiter missions that have successfully arrived at the Red Planet to date:

• Mariner 9 (NASA; arrived November 1971)
• Mars 2 (USSR; November 1971)
• Mars 3 (USSR; December 1971)
• Mars 5 (USSR; February 1976)
• Viking 1 (NASA; June 1976)
• Viking 2 (NASA; August 1976) 
• Phobos 2 (USSR; January 1989)
• Mars Global Surveyor (NASA; September 1997) 
• Mars Odyssey (NASA; October 2001)
• Mars Express (European Space Agency; December 2003); 
• Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO (NASA; March 2006)
• Mars Orbiter Mission (India; September 2014)
• MAVEN (NASA; September 2014)
• ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, or TGO (ESA; October 2016)
• Emirates Mars Mission, or Hope (UAE; February 2021)
• Tianwen 1 (China; February 2021)

Only Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, MRO, TGO, Hope and Tianwen 1 remain operational today, meaning the orbital graveyard has up to a dozen bodies in it. (It's tough to track unresponsive spacecraft in Mars orbit, so we generally don't know which dead ones are still aloft.)

There's a Mars graveyard on the surface, too. Among the many robots being buried by the wind-blown red dirt are NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Ingenuity helicopter and Pathfinder lander (which Mark Watney finds and uses in the book and movie "The Martian"), and Zhurong, a rover that was part of China's Tianwen 1 mission.

Just two Mars surface craft remain operational today: NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, which landed in August 2012 and February 2021, respectively.

But let's end with an appreciation of MAVEN (whose name is short for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution"). The probe's data has helped scientists better understand Mars' dramatic transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the frigid desert we know today.

That change occurred because Mars lost most of its once-thick atmosphere. (The planet's air is now just 1% as dense as that of Earth at sea level.) Thanks to MAVEN, we know that loss was driven by the solar wind and occurred between 4.2 billion and 3.7 billion years ago — around the time that life was getting started here on Earth.

NASA is saying goodbye to one of its most accomplished Mars orbiters.

After months of repeated attempts to reestablish contact with the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) satellite, NASA has declared the Red Planet probe dead. MAVEN's last transmission was received on Dec. 6, by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), before the solar-powered spacecraft's orbit took it behind Mars. When it emerged on the other side, telemetry data showed the satellite had switched to safe mode and was tumbling in an uncontrollable spin that led to a loss of power, according to a NASA review board in February.

Efforts to communicate with MAVEN since then have been unsuccessful, according to an agency release, and NASA officials held a press briefing at today (June 3) to discuss the end of MAVEN's mission. The cause of the satellite's incident on the far side of Mars is still under investigation.

The announcement of MAVEN's end brings a close to more than a decade of science and research. MAVEN launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in November 2013 and arrived in orbit around Mars 10 months later.

Shannon Curry, MAVEN's principal investigator, described the probe as the "Best. Mars. Mission. Ever." during Wednesday's call. Mike Moreau, the MAVEN project manager, praised the team and said they, "really experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission here."

Curry agreed, but highlighted MAVEN's many accomplishments. "The team was certainly broken up about this, but at the same time, we're incredibly proud of the science we've accomplished over the last decade," she said, and called MAVEN, "the best observer of atmospheric escape anywhere in the solar system."

MAVEN's anomaly review board concluded that the probe likely lost power within hours of its incident in December, "causing the communication system to eventually lose power and rendering the spacecraft in an unrecoverable state," Moreau said, and added, "the anomaly review board is continuing to perform their work to determine the root cause for the failure."

Its original mission was planned to last just one Earth year, but was extended for another 10 as it continued nominal operations. MAVEN's loss leaves only two NASA probes in operation in Mars orbit — the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which launched in 2001, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which lifted off in 2005. Both of those probes are also operating well beyond their original mission lifetimes.

MAVEN was also one of five spacecraft that NASA used as a communications relay for rovers on the Martian surface. The other four, which remain active, are Odyssey, MRO and Europe's Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft.

MAVEN was the first probe equipped with instrumentation to study the evolution of Mars' atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. The mission supplied data that led scientists to new discoveries, even after the orbiter fell silent.

“The data collected from MAVEN will continue to provide valuable insight into Mars for decades to come,” said Louise Prockter, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, in the agency's announcement.

"We have so much to learn from the data set that we're about to get ready to archive," Curry said.

Editor's note: This story was update at 3:50 p.m. EDT (1950 GMT), on Wednesday, June 3, to reflect statements from NASA and MAVEN officials during the press briefing to announce the mission's end.

SpaceX's next-gen Starship megarocket finally got off the ground last week.

On May 22, SpaceX's first Starship V3 ("Version 3") vehicle lifted off from a brand-new pad at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. It was the first Starship launch in more than seven months, a lag caused by the time it took to develop and incorporate V3's many upgrades over its predecessors. (The destruction of a V3 Super Heavy booster during testing in November didn't help, either.)

Though Starship V3 suffered a few engine glitches on May 22, and its Super Heavy booster didn't steer itself down for a soft ocean splashdown as planned, SpaceX heralded the suborbital test flight as a success. That's a big deal, because V3 is expected to carry a heavy load for the company, and for NASA, in the coming years.

Great expectations

The 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship V3 is the biggest and most powerful iteration of Starship yet. It's the first variant of the vehicle outfitted with SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engine, the sleekest, lightest and brawniest Raptor that the company has built.

V3 sports many other upgrades as well. For example, its Super Heavy first stage has an improved fuel-transfer system that allows the booster's 33 engines to fire more quickly, according to a May 12 SpaceX update.

The Ship upper stage, meanwhile, features a more efficient propulsion system, larger propellant tanks and docking ports that will enable meetups with refueling "tanker" vehicles in Earth orbit, among other modifications.

Those in-space meetups will be a big part of Starship missions in the future. Any Starship flight to the moon, Mars or another deep-space destination will require the launch of a dozen or more Ships to haul its required propellant to space, experts say. (The exact number of necessary tanker missions is hard to pin down.)

And the moon is indeed a target. In 2021, NASA selected Ship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of lunar exploration. SpaceX is currently working to get Ship ready for the next two Artemis missions — Artemis 3, a docking test with NASA's Orion crew capsule in low Earth orbit, and Artemis 4, which will land astronauts near the lunar south pole. If all goes to plan, Artemis 3 will launch in mid-2027, and Artemis 4 will lift off in late 2028.

Ship isn't guaranteed to fly on either of these missions, however. NASA also picked Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft to be an Artemis lander, and both are still in the running for Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. (Both private landers could fly on Artemis 3, NASA officials have said, but only one will make the trip to the moon a year later.)

Next steps

SpaceX is working to get Starship V3 up and running in time for Artemis 3. And it needs to move quickly, for there's a lot still needs to be done.

The immediate priority is determining why Super Heavy failed to stick its landing during the May 22 test flight. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration declared that failure a mishap and has grounded Starship until SpaceX wraps up an investigation into the matter.

After Starship V3 has been cleared to fly again, it will need to notch some big milestones in the final frontier — notably, reaching Earth orbit and topping off its tanks there. And SpaceX has laid out how it plans to tick those boxes.

"It will start with a Starship launched from Starbase to spend an extended time on orbit, gathering data on vehicle propulsion and thermal behavior on an extended duration mission, including long duration propellant storage and boil-off characterization," the company wrote in an update on Oct. 30, about two weeks after Starship's 11th test flight. "A second Starship will then launch to rendezvous with the first to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer in Earth orbit."

SpaceX aims to launch both of those Starship flights this year, the company added. But we don't know if the next Starship launch will kick off the first leg of that refueling test; SpaceX hasn't announced details about Flight 13 (including its flight date).

We should expect Starship to launch again relatively soon, however, for SpaceX prioritizes flight-testing as the best way to develop and mature its hardware. And there's no shortage of hardware to fly at the moment: The company has built up a stockpile of Starship V3 vehicles, according to founder and CEO Elon Musk.

"The Starship production pipeline is full and will complete roughly 10 more ships and about half that number of boosters this year," Musk wrote on May 18 via X, the social media platform he owns.

SpaceX also needs to integrate a life-support system into Starship ahead of Artemis 4. That vital tech may not be necessary for Artemis 3, however; NASA is still defining the parameters of that docking test and has left open the possibility that the astronauts will not enter whichever private lander flies on Artemis 3.

SpaceX has been operating life-support systems in space since 2020, when it launched its first Crew Dragon astronaut mission to the International Space Station. And the company has been working on a Starship version of the tech as well.

In the October 2025 update, SpaceX wrote that it has completed "lunar environmental control and life support and thermal control system demonstrations, using a full-scale cabin module inhabited by multiple people to test the capability to inject oxygen and nitrogen into the cabin environment and accurately manage air distribution and sanitation, along with humidity and thermal control."

There's other vital gear to integrate as well — the elevator, for instance. Ship stands a whopping 171 feet (52 meters) tall, so the astronauts who fly on it to the moon will need a way to get from the vehicle's nose (where the cabin will be) down to the gray dirt.

SpaceX has already conducted a demonstration of Ship elevator and airlock tech, according to the October 2025 update. That test — performed with Axiom Space, which is building the Artemis program's spacesuits — occurred at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California in mid-2024.

Over the longer term, we can expect an accelerating cadence of increasingly ambitious test flights as SpaceX gets even more proficient at building and flying Starship hardware.

Perhaps the most important of these trials is an uncrewed test flight to the lunar surface, which both Ship and Blue Moon will need to ace before the private vehicles are certified to carry NASA astronauts.

There's no stated timeline for either of those landmark flights, though at least one of them will have to occur before late 2028 to keep Artemis 4 on schedule. (A robotic prototype of Blue Moon will launch on a lunar-landing mission this fall, if all goes to plan. But the mature, crew-capable variant of Blue Moon will still have to duplicate the feat before astronauts can climb aboard.)

What can we expect once Starship gets fully up and running? It's hard to say, but Musk has certainly set expectations high.

"Our goal is launching Starship >10k/year, which would be more than once an hour," the world's richest man wrote via X on May 23. "Probably over 200 tons of useful load to a useful orbit per flight by then."

Just five days after its debut flight, SpaceX's Starship V3 megarocket has been grounded.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) just declared the May 22 Starship V3 launch a mishap and is requiring an investigation before the huge vehicle can take to the skies again.

"A return to flight of the Starship-Super Heavy vehicle is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety," FAA officials wrote in an update today (May 27).

Starship consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or Ship for short.

SpaceX believes that Starship — the biggest and most powerful launcher ever built — will revolutionize spaceflight, making Mars settlement and other ambitious exploration feats economically feasible.

The new, 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) V3 ("Version 3") variant is a key part of that vision. It's the first Starship iteration capable of deep-space flight, according to SpaceX, and will carry astronauts to the lunar surface on NASA's Artemis 4 mission in late 2028, if all goes to plan.

So last week's suborbital test flight — the 12th overall for the Starship program — was a very big deal for the company. It went well in most respects. For example, Ship successfully deployed 20 dummy Starlink internet satellites, as well as two actual Starlinks equipped with cameras to image the vehicle's heat shield in space. And the upper stage survived its reentry to Earth's atmosphere in good shape, making a soft, controlled splashdown off the coast of Western Australia as planned.

Super Heavy was supposed to make a soft splashdown of its own, in the Gulf of Mexico. But the booster was unable to perform the engine burns needed for this controlled return and ended up "experiencing a hard splashdown" in the Gulf, as SpaceX wrote in a mission update.

The FAA deemed this result a mishap and is requiring the company to conduct an investigation into its cause.

"The FAA will oversee the SpaceX-led investigation, be involved in every step of the process, and approve SpaceX’s final report, including any corrective actions," agency officials wrote in today's update.

It's unclear how long this investigation will take. But don't bet on a significant delay, as SpaceX tends to work fast. For instance, an FAA grounding of the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket this past February lasted just four days.

Don't miss Jupiter, Venus and Mercury put on a spectacular show as they line up in the evening sky on May 27, creating a 'planetary bridge' between the constellations of Gemini and Taurus.

Jupiter will shine as a steady point of light roughly 30 degrees above the western horizon at sunset, with Venus appearing as a bright star-like object to its lower right. Mercury will complete the line-up, glistening close to the horizon, but will prove a greater challenge to spot in the glow of the setting sun.

Wait until the sun is safely below the horizon before turning your binoculars or a small telescope on Jupiter. Don't forget, you can use a trusted resource like Time and Date's daylight tracker to discover exactly when the sun will set from your location.

With clear skies and a small telescope or pair of binoculars, you should be able to spot four bright points of light clustered around the gas giant's glowing disk, representing the four large Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

A 4-inch scope should allow you to pick out the moon-like phases of Venus, while a larger 6 to 8-inch telescope will help reveal the multicoloured cloud bands that line Jupiter's atmosphere, along with colossal storms that dwarf the most ferocious weather systems of Earth.

Mercury will set less than 90 minutes after the sun on May 27 for viewers in the U.S., with Venus slipping below the western horizon roughly an hour later. Jupiter, meanwhile, will linger later in the western sky, finally disappearing shortly before midnight alongside the bright stars Castor and Pollux, which represent the heads of the celestial twins in the constellation Gemini.

Want to get a closer look at Jupiter and the other worlds of the solar system? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the night sky, while photographers should read up on our picks for the top cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you snap a photo of the planetary line-up and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your image(s) alongside your comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

In early May, NASA satellites imaged an underwater volcanic eruption in the Bismarck Sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea. But when volcanologists looked to study the event, they reached a frustrating wall. There are no high-resolution maps of the seafloor here.

That lack of baseline data made it more difficult for scientists to determine exactly how the eruption reshaped the seafloor or how large the volcanic structure may be. In fact, they aren't even sure which geological feature even erupted. Current theories suggest the eruption likely occurred along the Titan Ridge, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of a 1972 submarine eruption site.

"The good news is that there are huge opportunities to explore and learn using both government and commercial satellite platforms already in orbit," Jim Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

Existing satellite imagery allows scientists to analyze the miles-high ash plume, discoloration in the ocean water, rafts of the volcanic rock pumice emanating from the event, and even thermal events captured by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA's Suomi NPP satellite.

"There must be a lot of hot material near the surface to generate so many thermal anomalies," Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Tech, said in the statement. "This suggests a fairly shallow eruption vent — much shallower than what's implied by the existing bathymetry, which shows water depths of several hundred meters or more."

Now, researchers are waiting to see if a new island will be born out of the eruption, which Garvin points out is something we've rarely observed via satellite in real-time. It would likely take some time for one to form, and it's unclear how long this eruption might last. The nearby 1972 eruption, for instance, lasted four days, whereas another nearby eruption in 1957 lasted just short of four years.

If one does form, it might provide a chance for boots-on-the-ground research. "This new eruption could present an even better opportunity for 'island-naut' exploration as we prepare to return to the moon with women and men via Artemis IV," said Garvin. With this, Garvin is referring to how researchers could study the budding island and test out how it responds to different weather events and introduction of some animal species — and even the humans themselves. Could the results from such studies inform how future astronauts attempt to create settlements on the moon and Mars someday?

Maybe so. But either way, we can be certain the discussion prompted by this satellite footage proves one common truism in oceanography: We know far more about the surface of the moon than the deep-ocean floor.

Even as NASA continues to try to restore contact with the MAVEN spacecraft after it fell silent in late 2025, scientists analyzing its data have spotted a phenomenon in Mars’ atmosphere that, until now, had only been observed around strongly magnetized planets like Earth.

The finding could help scientists better understand how space weather shapes worlds without protective magnetic shields, including planets such as Venus and Saturn's largest moon Titan, the researchers say.

The phenomenon, known as the Zwan-Wolf effect, helps deflect the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles flowing from the sun — as it encounters a planet’s magnetic environment. On Earth, a powerful magnetic field generated deep within the planet's core creates a vast protective bubble, or magnetosphere, that continuously redirects those particles around the planet. Mars, however, lost most of its global magnetic field billions of years ago and today possesses only a much weaker, patchier magnetic environment formed when the solar wind interacts directly with the planet’s thin upper atmosphere.

This makes the new finding especially surprising, researchers say. Until now, the Zwan-Wolf effect had only been observed in the large magnetospheres surrounding strongly magnetized planets, not deep within a planetary atmosphere.

"No one expected that this effect could even occur in the atmosphere," Christopher Fowler, a professor at West Virginia University who led the study, said in a statement. "That's what makes this even more exciting."

The discovery, he added, "introduces interesting physics that we haven't yet explored and a new way the sun and space weather can change the dynamics in the Martian atmosphere."

Fowler and his team identified the phenomenon while examining data collected by the now-silent MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, during the aftermath of a powerful solar storm that struck Mars in December 2023. Roughly 12 hours after the storm slammed into the planet, MAVEN recorded unusual fluctuations in Mars' upper atmosphere, according to the study.

The team's analysis showed charged particles were being funneled and squeezed along temporary magnetic structures created during the solar storm — behaving "like toothpaste coming out of a tube" — in a way that closely matched the Zwan-Wolf effect seen around Earth.

"When investigating the data, I all of a sudden noticed some very interesting wiggles," Fowler said in the statement. "I would never have guessed it would be this effect, since it's never been seen in a planetary atmosphere before."

The findings also suggest the phenomenon may actually occur continuously on Mars, but under normal conditions it is likely too weak for MAVEN's instruments to detect. Researchers say the intense solar storm temporarily amplified the effect enough for it to stand out clearly in the spacecraft's observations.

"The effect likely operates continuously at Mars, but below instrumentation detection thresholds most of the time," the study notes.

The discovery also arrives during an uncertain period for the MAVEN mission itself. The spacecraft, which has been studying Mars since 2014, lost contact with Earth in December 2025 after it was expected to emerge from behind Mars following a planned communications pause during a solar conjunction.

NASA's attempts to reestablish contact have so far been unsuccessful, and the agency has launched an anomaly review board to assess the spacecraft's condition and chances of recovery.

"We haven't officially said MAVEN is lost yet," Louise Prockter, director of NASA's planetary science division, said during a town hall at this year's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.

"We're still looking for it."

The team's results were published on May 18 in the journal Nature Communications.

In northeastern California lies a series of caves that formed thousands of years ago when volcanoes erupted lava that later solidified, leaving behind tunnels wide enough for humans to walk through. But Earth isn't the only planet in our solar system with volcanoes — extraterrestrial caves formed all across the solar system.

Take Mars, for instance. Millions of years before life on Earth came to be, volcanoes erupted on the Red Planet, too. Martian volcanoes appear to be dormant right now, but that former activity left behind the largest tunnel network in the solar system. The resulting lava tubes stretch over 820 feet (250 meters) across, more than eight times the width of California's tunnels. So far, researchers have found tube systems on Mars reaching over 746 miles (1,200 kilometers), enough to cover the continental United States three times over. Plus, scientists think more tunnels are yet to be discovered.

But in order to understand how vast the network is, scientists are pushing at the limits of space exploration. One of these scientists suggests the idea of "dandelion drones."

At present, our Mars exploration efforts have been pretty heavily based around rovers, like Curiosity and Perseverance. However, as pioneering as these robotic vehicles are, they're reaching their limitations when it comes to lava tubes.

"The rovers are the size of a school bus," Mostafa Hassanalian, associated professor at New Mexico Tech, told Space.com. "That's why they can’t get in."

The atmosphere of Mars is also unforgiving, meaning winds of up to 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour) can batter these explorers, and have even torn chunks out of Curiosity rover across the years.

What's a dandelion drone?

Hassanalian's drones are designed on the idea of biomimicry: the concept that robotics should copy what we observe in nature instead of reinventing what nature already succeeds in doing.

Biomimicry often fails when the design is too large, Hassanalian says, but is most efficient on the microscale. "There's a reason airplanes don't flap," he explained.

For example, the dandelion drone concept begins with another kind of robot Hassanalian and his team designed called the "roly-poly robot," based on a pillbug, which rolls up into a ball when threatened. The idea is to deploy a pillbug drone through a hole in the roof of a cave, equipping it with a parachute to allow it to drift down to the cave floor. This roly-poly robot will be holding thousands of small drones, or dandelion drones, within.

The pillbug robot will then release all of those thousands of drones in the cave, with the dandelion robots being propelled by Mars' strong winds for miles upon miles and mapping out the tunnels as they fly.

However, one hurdle will be making sure there is enough wind to carry the dandelion drones. Because nothing human-made has ever entered Martian lava tubes, scientists aren't exactly sure how strong the winds will be. A lack of wind would pose a problem.

But many researchers think the holes in the cave system ceiling will ventilate the tunnels, making them very windy. Plus, the robot comes equipped with a high-powered fan, in case the wind isn’t strong enough or dies down.

Another complication the team must think about is the fact that sunlight can't enter the cave, so solar panels — the most common source of powering a spacecraft — won't work. Instead, Hassanalian has designed the dandelion drones to work with piezoelectricity, made from a flexible polymer which generates an electric charge.

During the design phase, the team also realized that air-propelled seeds in nature are usually white because they reflect more sunlight, keeping them cooler and lighter. They thus plan to paint the dandelion drones white to let them travel further.

Once in the air, the dandelion drones would transmit data via radio signals, collecting readings on humidity, temperature and eventually creating a blueprint of the entire tunnel system.

A race to the tunnels

Hassanalian's isn't the only team looking at lava-tube exploration. In a series of tests beginning in 2023, a group of European scientists led by the Space Robotics Laboratory at the University of Malaga dropped robots into lava tubes found on an island in Spain called Lanzarote in order to map out the tunnel system in preparation for a possible future Mars mission.

NASA has also made 72 flights using the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter across the planet's surface, proving the potential for further exploration. But this drone was designed to fly in the open air, and never got a chance to venture into the lava tubes before ultimately meeting its demise in 2024.

Drone plans developed by NASA suggest the space agency is particularly interested in Arsia Mons, a shield volcano in Mars' Tharsis region, which includes the largest volcanoes in the solar system, such as Olympus Mons — almost three times as high as Mount Everest.

The Tharsis region alone is the size of the dwarf planet Ceres. When the bulge formed, it added so much mass that Mars is thought to have tilted approximately 20 degrees. The exact reason why is debated by scientists, but theories include a huge collision in early Martian history, or unstable mantle plumes.

The Arsia Mons volcano is of particular interest to NASA because the agency spotted holes in the shield where the volcanic ceiling had collapsed, leaving skylights behind and revealing a vast tunnel network within.

Thermal readings taken from the volcanic holes suggested that the temperature inside wasn't changing as drastically as on the surface, raising exciting hopes that humans could one day live within and even supporting the idea that life native to Mars may had survived inside.

NASA is also eyeing up potential caves on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, selecting Johns Hopkins' "Dragonfly" spacecraft to explore the surface.

Humans aren't supposed to land on the planet until the 2030s at the very earliest. When that day finally comes, drone scouting could prove vital for humanity's long-term survival on Mars.

Acclaimed actor Costa Ronin ("The Americans," "Homeland") is another fresh face in Apple TV’s "For All Mankind" season five; his Soviet ex-cosmonaut politician, Leonid "Lenya" Polivanov, has the dubious honor of presiding over Happy Valley as the official governor of Mars.

"The entourage makes the king, right?" Ronin tells Space. "The colony has grown so much, and with any growth of any colony, there’s more to do and more responsibility and more political intrigue."

It can be challenging for an actor to join a show so late into its run, but Ronin has embraced that challenge. "It has been incredible to walk into a show that's been TV royalty for so many years. You walk in on set, and you get to play with your favorite actors, your favorite characters, and favorite world. It's really quite remarkable."

Regarding Polivanov's ultimate allegiances on the Red Planet, the series has made the most of Ronin's instinctive skills to present a mercurial, multidimensional personality who is much craftier than he first appears. Often leveraging his powers at will as Mars is being cut off from aid, even as he’s secretly hoping to become the USSR's next President.

"I approach it as if you imagine a bow and arrow,” explains Ronin on his artistic process. "You know where the shot is going to come from; this is where we meet that character. Then I try to go as far as I can to create as much backstory as possible so that by the time it's day one of filming, I kind of release him into the world and let him make his own decisions.

"I had multiple conversations with the creators of the show and the writers to get an idea of where the character was going and, more importantly, where he's coming from" notes Ronin. "What he says ultimately is dictated by what he thinks, and what he thinks is dictated by what he knows."

That meant homework for Ronin before he could step into the role.

"It was important for me to read those books that he perhaps would have read about the Soviet space program. Because he comes from being a cosmonaut. He does not come from a nepotism environment of political powers. I created a cosmonaut who then later, through his wife’s relationships and ambitious family ties, became a politician, which led him to be the governor of Mars."

Ronin composed his Martian governor role with absolute precision, assembling the character from the inside out and harkening back to his early cosmonaut days. His fashionable wardrobe was selected by costume designer Esther Marquis. until it came to one essential accessory.

"I know how to tie a tie, and there are ten or twenty ways to do it,” he admits. "And the only way I don’t know how to tie a tie is exactly the way they tie it in the show. So I always had to have somebody come do it. "

Beyond his own styling, Ronin also leaned on the prop department to help him get into the character of Polivanov. "There’s a scene in the governor’s office where there were a few things I wanted to have there from his past days as a cosmonaut," Ronin explains. "I wanted him to have two clocks and two watches to know this was the time on Mars, and this was the time in Moscow. So there were little things that may not necessarily be visible to the audience, but I, as a character, knew."

As to how he wrapped his mind around the notion that his Lenya Polivanov was residing on another planet? Ronin felt it wasn’t too tough because he didn’t really get to play outside.

“So I didn’t get to play with zero gravity or any of the elements that space brings into our life," he notes. "To me, the fact that the sets were built with such incredible attention to detail helped tremendously. It didn’t matter if you were in an actual building or in a spaceship because everything was functional. The only thing that spaceship didn’t do was actually fly. Every button had a function and a purpose. We have tremendous consultants, and we were always able to refer to them.

"There's a scene where Celia and I fly in a transport hopper, and we had a conversation with the consultants to make sure this was the actual sequence of how it would happen in real life. These are the buttons that would get us there. So when you are in the pilot’s chair in your scene, you don’t have to think about it because the character would be able to do that in his sleep."

"For All Mankind" season 5 is streaming now exclusively on Apple TV, where you can also find the previous four seasons.

The most powerful rocket in history just roared off its launch pad in a spectacular show of power and technology.

SpaceX launched the newest version of its giant Starship rocket Friday (May 22), from a recently completed second pad at its Starbase manufacturing and test facility in South Texas. Liftoff occurred at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), sending the massive 408-foot-tall (124-meter) vehicle skyward on its 12th suborbital test flight.

It was the first Starship mission since October 2025, and the first-ever flight of Starship Version 3 (V3), a next-generation build of the rocket that features a complete design overhaul meant to evolve the vehicle toward operational missions. And today's suborbital Flight 12 was a significant step toward that ambitious goal, even if it was a day later than planned after a glitched thwarted a first launch try on Thursday.

"Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch & landing!," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X after the launch. "You scored a goal for humanity."

There were some hiccups.

During liftoff, one of the 33 first-stage Raptor engines on Super Heavy shut down, and the booster missed a critical "boost back" manuever to control its return to Earth. Starship's Ship 39 upper stage also lost one of its six main engines during ascent, but managed to reach space on the remaining five.

"I wouldn't call it nominal orbital insertion, but we're in on a trajectory that we had analyzed, and it's within bounds," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said in live commentary. "So, teams continuing to work through it with that engine out there, working some through some steps on the engines."

Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper stage known as Starship, or simply Ship. The first notable event after the rocket cleared the tower this evening occurred about 2 minutes and 20 seconds into flight, when Super Heavy initiated "hot staging" and separation from Ship. (It's known as hot staging because Ship begins firing its engines before separating from Super Heavy.)

Unlike its V2 predecessor, which featured an interstage ring that fell away at separation, Starship V3 is built with similar hardware secured to the top of the booster, like a fence around the fuel tank's dome to give some breathing room to the upper stage engines' ignition and initial thrust away from the booster.

After stage separation, Super Heavy reoriented and attempted to perform a one-minute boostback burn toward Starbase. However, something went wrong and the burn didn't go as planned, Huot said.

SpaceX has performed booster recoveries at Starbase on previous Starship missions, catching the rocket's first stage using mechanical "chopstick" arms attached to the site's launch towers. On Flight 12, however, the company planed to return Super Heavy a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico rather than risk a recovery mishap that could damage the pad on the first flight of brand-new hardware.

Instead, the massive Super Heavy booster plummeted back to Earth and crashed into the Gulf, beaming live views of its fall from space until the screen went black.

"The booster didn't complete its full boost back," Huot said just after lifotff. "Its mission ended a little bit early, but landed in the clear area that we had set in advance."

SpaceX included 22 payloads for Ship to deploy during its suborbital jaunt today — 20 dummy versions of the company's Starlink broadband satellites and two actual Starlink spacecraft equipped with imaging sensors.

The payloads were deployed as planned over a 10-minute span, beginning roughly 17 minutes after launch, via Ship's "PEZ dispenser"-like door. The two modified Starlink satellites were tasked with scanning Starship's heat shield tiles, in a test meant to assess the ability to inspect them for possible damage prior to reentry.

Shortly after the final two Starlink simulators deployed (the ones with cameras that SpaceX nicknamed "Dodger Dogs" after the famed hotdogs at Dodger Stadium), SpaceX broadcast the spectactular video they captured as they flew away from Starship.

"That is a Starship in space," Huot said.

SpaceX initially planned for the Ship 39 upper stage to perform an in-space relight of one of its six Raptor engines in orbit— an important demonstration to prove the spacecraft can reliably execute maneuvers, as mixing and managing cryogenic fuels and reigniting an engine in zero-g is necessary to alter Ship's orbit, send it on to the moon or Mars, and bring it back to Earth for recovery and reuse. But because of the lost Raptor engine during launch, flight controllers skipped that test for Flight 12.

And so, the first Starship V3 spacecraft began its descent to Earth.

Ship began its reentry to Earth's atmosphere about 50 minutes into the flight, falling as its belly became engulfed in a bright plasma. During its descent, Ship 39 performed a series of exercises designed to stress parts of the vehicle to their structural limit. It also executed a novel banking maneuver for its landing burn meant to mimic the trajectory and orientation needed for a launch tower catch on a return to Starbase.

Huge cheers rang out at SpaceX's headquareters and Starbase facilities as the Ship 39 ignited two engines for a final landing burn. The manuever initially called for three engines, but that one shut down early at liftoff. After the landing, Starship toppled over into the ocean waters and exploded in a magnificent fireball (again, as planned) as SpaceX workers cheered.

Nothing Starship accomplished on Flight 12 was particularly groundbreaking for SpaceX; the mission goals and trajectories were broadly similar to those of the previous few test missions.

However, even successfully following a previously blazed trail was huge for Starship V3, given that it's a brand-new vehicle with a variety of modifications and upgrades over its predecessors. And V3's road to the launch pad was a bit rocky.

SpaceX ran into some issues during the testing of the new V3 build in November last year, resulting in the loss of the Super Heavy booster originally slated for the Flight 12 mission. Now, with more than half a year between Starship's last two launches, SpaceX has some catching up to do.

NASA is relying on Starship as one of the crewed lunar landers for its Artemis program, which aims to eventually establish a permanent human presence on the moon. The space agency has also contracted Blue Moon, a Blue Origin spacecraft, to land Artemis astronauts on the moon, and has indicated a willingness to fly with whichever private lander is ready when it's time for the missions to get off the ground.

The next of those missions is Artemis 3 — the follow-up to April's Artemis 2, which flew four astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft on a successful 10-day mission around the moon. NASA is targeting mid to late 2027 for Artemis 3, which will launch Orion to low Earth orbit (LEO) to rendezvous and dock with one or both of the private lunar landers, and late 2028 for the first lunar landing on Artemis 4.

As if to drive that fact home, NASA chief Jared Isaacman flew to Starbase to watch the launch personally.

"We're looking forward to seeing this thing fly, because hopefully at some point in the not too distant future we're gonna, we're gonna join up in an earth orbit," Isaacman said during the live comentary.

After the launch, Isaacman hailed the work of SpaceX's Starship team.

"Congrats SpaceX team and Elon Musk on a hell of a V3 Starship launch," Isaacman wrote on X. "One step closer to the Moon ... one step closer to Mars."

Starship has a number of boxes to check before NASA certifies the vehicle to fly astronauts, but V3 has been built with those goalposts in mind.

The new Starship V3 vehicle includes four passive connection ports on its back, or leeward, side (opposite the heat tiles on its belly), which are designed for docking and ship-to-ship fuel transfers.

In order to fly beyond LEO, Starship requires the assistance of additional Ships to meet up in orbit to top off its fuel tanks. This is especially important for its use as the Artemis moon lander; experts have estimated that each lunar Starship mission could require a dozen or more refueling launches to adequately supply enough propellant to get to the moon, land and launch back to lunar orbit.

Ship has yet to demonstrate in-space refueling, or even a launch that fully reaches Earth orbit. And there are other boxes it needs to tick as well.

For example, NASA is requiring both Starship and Blue Moon to demonstrate uncrewed lunar landings before they fly astronauts down to the lunar surface, putting SpaceX and Blue Origin on a short timeline to ready vehicles for the planned Artemis 4 landing in 2028.

Starship's launch today helps put it back on track toward meeting that goal, but SpaceX will have to pick up its launch cadence significantly. Just over a year ago, in March 2025, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that he expected to be launching V3 at a "rate of once a week in [about] 12 months."

While that cadence still seems a long way off at Starship's current state of development, the success of Flight 12 bodes well for the near future. And hopefully the near future features another Starship launch — a giant rocket getting off the ground in a matter of weeks, versus the seven months that separated today’s mission from the previous test flight.

Apple TV's "For All Mankind" is setting up for an explosive season 5 finale as hungry Marsies are growing impatient, and Earth's M-6 Alliance just dispatched an inexperienced military fire team to commandeer the all-important Goldilocks asteroid and its precious Iridium resources.

Avery "AJ" Jarrett (Ines Asserson) and Lily Dale (Ruby Cruz) are two of this season's newest young adult characters. They were last seen as children in season 4, but they are all grown up now with the show’s time jump to the 2010s. We connected with Asserson and Cruz to learn more about their journeys on Apple TV’s flagship sci-fi series and the rigors of zipping up a spacesuit!

“We had so many different costumes because of their development in her association with the Marines," Asserson tells Space. "It was so cool, and I felt really powerful in the uniforms during the space travel to Mars. We weren't in them very long. It was easy to physically enter the headspace of a Marine wearing them. The first time in a spacesuit was really cool, then I realized they're not that easy to wear. They're heavy and clunky, and you want them to look cool. I mean, when else would I get to wear a spacesuit?"

Asserson's Off-Planet Expeditionary Force (OPEF) marine is a complex individual whose family legacy is a generational aspect of the hit show. She's the daughter of Danny and Amber Stevens, and granddaughter of astronauts Gordo and Tracy Stevens, who sacrificed themselves in season 2's finale to save the Jamestown lunar base by taking a suicidal moonwalk.

"There’s so many tensions with AJ; there’s this rigidity and so much desire and emotion and loneliness within her," explains Asserson.

"She’s really fighting such a battle with herself that speaks to that kind of yearning for belonging and friendship and family as well, and to embrace her family history. Her struggling wth her past is always going to be a difficult thing for Avery. I think that’s going to take shape in many different situations. Everything is going to make her see another side of herself."

In crafting her Earth-based soldier character, Asserson talked to a number of veterans, which was something that became incredibly informative to understand the mindset of combat and camaraderie.

"Then we did a lot of CQB (Close-Quarter Battle) training with a real Green Beret," she adds. "He was phenomenal. We learned to clear rooms, operate guns in a way that's realistic, and to work together as an OPEF group. Those friendships have really become super important to me in my real life, actually, which I think is that Marine mentality."

Ruby Cruz portrays Lilly Dale, the daughter of Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell), and an ambitious journalist who helped leak the secret Happy Valley automation documents to the press with Alex (Sean Kaufman).

"Building Lilly was really fun because I got to watch Miles Dale in season 4 and build the daughter that that father would raise," Cruz tells Space. "It's so cool thinking about the different qualities in him that she would really admire and look up to and want to embody. And the different qualities in him that really frustrate her and that she would want to reject. Building out with Toby was really fun because he's one of the funniest people.

"I really like that Lily is a young person discovering her voice in fighting for what she believes in. She has this very rebellious, fiery, impulsive nature that I can somewhat relate to. I don’t like the establishment. I don't like organized systems," notes Cruz.

"And I do relate to her in that way, but she's harsher than I am, and I liked being in that headspace. She also has a very big heart and has a lot of care for people. I think her journalistic tendencies are really cool. She cares about the truth, and it was inspiring to be reminded that it's a very important thing."

Filming in multiple sound stages on the historic Sony Pictures Studio lot in Culver City, California, was particularly rewarding for Cruz, as was trying to absorb the production’s insane scale.

"Nothing shoots in L.A., so it’s cool shooting at home. But also to film on these historic stages. 'The Wizard of Oz' filmed there!" exclaims Cruz.

"Then, to be in such immersive sets made it easy for an actor to be immersed immediately, and that was a rare experience. The spacesuits are like real spacesuits! They're so complicated and much heavier than you'd ever expect. [Costume Designer] Esther Marquis is so well versed in making space suits that space companies have approached her in helping design their suits."

"For All Mankind" season 5 streams exclusively on Apple TV, along with the previous four seasons.

When SpaceX attempted to launch its newest (and tallest) megarocket yet on Thursday (May 21), all eyes were on the shiny Starship Version 3 atop its South Texas pad. Especially NASA's, since the agency wants to use the towering rocketship to land Artemis astronauts on the moon in two years.

So it was a bit of a surprise when SpaceX, with less than 15 minutes remaining before liftoff, announced something new: A private Starship mission to Mars, a flyby expedition led by cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang.

"So it's going to be a flyby mission of Mars," Wang said in a recorded announcement unveiled by SpaceX during live launch commentary (the Starship V3 liftoff was ultimately scrubbed). "A lot of people talk about Mars. We like Mars, we're gonna land on Mars. We're gonna do a city on Mars. But let's get it started with a flyby."

SpaceX did not announce a target date or year for when Wang might launch to Mars (its Starships have not yet orbited Earth, let alone reached the moon or carried astronauts to space). Nor did SpaceX or Wang announce who might join the entrepreneur on the flight.

Wang, who already flew in space on the private SpaceX Dragon mission Fram2 over Earth's poles in 2025, made the announcement while speaking with SpaceX's Dan Huot from the extremely remote Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, a lonely isle 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) southwest of South Africa's Cape of Good Hope.

"It's arguably one of the most remote islands in the world," Wang said. But with this Starship Mars mission, Wang is looking for a place even more remote, and he's not worried about being bored on the way. Huot said the mission includes long legs to and from Mars, with the flyby lasting just two hours.

"This is actually for my style of fireworks," he told Huot. "I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff through landing, so I think I'm going to enjoy the trip."

During Fram2, Wang and three other private astronauts on his crew made history as the first four people ever to fly over Earth's poles during the 3.5-day mission. The Mars mission will make history as well, and even fly by the moon on the way to the Red Planet, SpaceX said.

"Even though it's a flyby, it will try a lot of things never attempted before," Wang said.

Wang isn't the first billionaire to book a trip to the moon or beyond on a SpaceX Starship. He's actually the fourth. So the question of when, or perhaps even IF, his Starship Mars mission will fly is a reasonable one to ask.

In 2018, Japanese billionaire Yusaka Maezawa announced a grand plan called dearMoon, which would use Starship to fly eight civilians — a mix of artists, performers, YouTube creators and more — to the moon and back. But Maezawa, who later flew to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz capsule (he actually bought two tickets, one for himself and another for a videographer), ultimately canceled that Starship trip in 2025 after years of waiting.

"I signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption that dearMoon would launch by the end of 2023," Maezawa said in a statement on X after canceling the flight. "It's a developmental project, so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch." SpaceX founder Elon Musk first announced what would become the Starship program in 2016.

Then, in 2022, SpaceX found a new billionaire interested in Starship. It was Dennis Tito, who made history in 2001 when he became the world's first space tourist to buy a ticket to the International Space Station, on a Russian Soyuz (for a reported $20 million). With SpaceX, he was likely putting down a lot more for a trip around the moon on Starship for himself and his wife Akiko.

"This program could prove to be one of the most important accomplishments in six million years of human history," Tito said of Starship at the time. (Tito also once tried to assemble a private flyby of Mars by 2018 as part of his Inspiration Mars concept, but it depended heavily on the quick development of NASA's Space Launch System megarocket, which did not fly until 2022).

Also in 2022, yet another billionaire booked a private Starship trip: American entrepreneur Jared Isaacman.

If that name sounds familiar, it should. Isaacman is the head of NASA now, serving as the space agency's administrator after being nominated by the Trump administration, then called off, then re-nominated and finally confirmed by the Senate this past December.

Isaacman is also a seasoned pilot (he flies MiG jets and cofounded the Black Diamond Jet Team) who financed SpaceX's first-ever private astronaut flight — Inspiration4 in 2021 — then bought three more flights with SpaceX as part of his Polaris Program. Those flights included Polaris Dawn in 2024, during which Isaacman performed the world's first private spacewalk. A second Dragon flight was to come next, and be followed by the first crewed flight of a Starship vehicle. The latter two missions have not yet launched, and it is unlikely Isaacman will fly them while serving as NASA administrator.

Isaacman, though, is still betting on a crewed Starship flight soon, this time for NASA astronauts. NASA picked SpaceX to land its Artemis astronauts on the moon by 2028. Earlier this year, under Isaacman's leadership, NASA restructured the schedule for that moon landing, which will now occur on the Artemis 4 mission.

SpaceX will likely attempt an uncrewed landing of Starship before that flight, and NASA hopes the company will have a Starship lander ready for an Earth orbit docking test by Artemis 3 astronauts in 2027.

Wang, meanwhile, believes his mission to Mars could help inspire people around the world to pursue interests in space exploration and the Red Planet.

"It will light the fire. It will ignite the imagination, and it will build the momentum," Wang said in the SpaceX video. "After we come back from Mars, we will have the opportunity to take some real photos, especially of Mars. Mars will no longer become a distant place. It will become a reality."

We'll all have to wait at least one more day to see the most powerful rocket ever built take to the skies — even "Starships" singer Nicki Minaj.

SpaceX tried to launch its new Starship V3 megarocket for the first time ever this evening (May 21), from the company's Starbase site in South Texas. Technical issues cropped up late in the countdown, however, and SpaceX couldn't resolve them in time to get Starship V3 off the ground.

"We're learning about a lot about these systems as we execute them for the first time, and we're not able to basically troubleshoot all of these issues in those final seconds to get to launch," Dan Huot, of SpaceX communications, said during the company's launch webcast today.

"That essentially makes this a wet dress rehearsal," he added, referring to a common preflight fueling test. "We were able to fully load the vehicles, and we're going to take the time now, figure out what tripped us up before launch, and then actually get into a flight tomorrow."

As that comment indicates, the next opportunity for a liftoff is Friday evening (May 22), likely in the same window as today's try — 6:30 p.m. EDT to 8 p.m. EDT (2230 to 0000 GMT).

The scrub was doubtless disappointing for many space fans, including Minaj, who was on hand at Starbase for today's launch attempt.

"This is historic. This is a major moment, y'all," Minaj said during SpaceX's launch webcast, adding that she's never seen a launch in person before.

Minaj wore a SpaceX Starship T-shirt for the launch. "I love this shirt," she said. "And it's a great name — Starship!" (One of Minaj's most famous songs is "Starships," from the 2012 Album "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded.")

Starship is a fully reusable vehicle consisting of two stages — a giant booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity colonize the moon and Mars, finish deploying its Starlink megaconstellation in Earth orbit and do pretty much everything else the company wants to do in the final frontier.

The megarocket remains in the development phase, however. It debuted in April 2023 and has flown 10 more test flights since then, all of them suborbital. The next launch will be the 12th for the program overall but the first for Starship V3 ("Version 3"), a dramatic overhaul designed to take the vehicle a giant step closer to operational status. It will also be the first liftoff for Starbase's Pad 2, which features many upgrades over the site's original pad as well.

V3 is the first iteration of Starship capable of flying to the moon and Mars, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said. If all goes according to plan, it's the variant that will fly on NASA's Artemis 3 mission — a docking test in Earth orbit — in mid to late 2027. And it's the vehicle that will land astronauts on the moon on Artemis 4 in late 2028.

There's competition for those flights, however: NASA is also considering using Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, and will probably go with whichever vehicle is ready (though the agency has said both landers might fly on Artemis 3).

On Thursday, SpaceX even announced a more ambitious crewed test flight for Starship: The world's first private trip to Mars.

In a video, SpaceX announced that cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who financed a private polar spaceflight with SpaceX on a Dragon capsule called Fram2 in 2025, will lead a flyby around Mars sometime in the future.

"So it's going to be a flyby mission of Mars," Wang said. "A lot of people talk about Mars. We like Mars, we're gonna land on Mars. We're gonna do a city on Mars. But let's get it started with a flyby."

Liftoff seemed tantalizingly close multiple times today. The countdown clock reached its built-in hold at T-40 seconds, then rolled past that mark several times before an issue cropped up and caused a reset. One such issue concerned the water diverter under the launch pad, according to Huot.

SpaceX called the launch off today around 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT). There were still more than 20 minutes left in the launch window, but that wasn't the issue.

SpaceX can hold at T-40 seconds for just a few minutes; after that, propellant temperatures rise too much to ensure nominal liftoff conditions, Huot explained.

Apple TV’s "For All Mankind" is cruising into the final episodes of its fifth season, and these are restless times for the Martian settlement of Happy Valley as conflicts mount. We’ve got irate workers rebelling against automation, Earth’s M-6 sending marines to reclaim the Goldilocks asteroid, food supplies running low, and a Titan mission seeking out alien life.

Portraying down on her luck security officer and a member of Happy Valley's Mars Peacekeeper Force, Mireille Enos’ ("The Killing") Celia Boyd has quickly become one of the sci-fi series' most compelling characters while she finds herself in the thick of conflicts erupting on the Red Planet.

"Story always wins," Enos tells Space regarding her casting. "You always just want to be telling good stories. But I'd been telling myself that I really don't want to play anymore cops for a while. I’d done that and I got to do that in a really elegant way. Then the guys came and said they'd love for me to be a cop on Mars. I said, 'You guys, I don’t want to be a cop.' We started a creative dialogue and the thing that was very interesting to me about her is that ultimately she is very skilled, and she believes in herself at the beginning, but she's not good at her job."

"And that's such a weird starting point, to be introducing a new character who's kind of at a low, trying to hide under a rock, has run away from her life" explains Enos about what attracted her to the role. "She's not really a cop, she's really just a glorified security guard."

Despite the cool red beret worn by the settlement's law enforcement unit, Boyd is an underdog whose past decisions haven't been the smartest. And yet, she’s tenacious and fans have watched her evolve over the course of the season to play a pivotal role in revolts and Free Mars uprisings.

"She doesn't want a promotion or any attention. She's just trying to stay under the radar. How do you build a person who’s not trying to reach for anything, yet the moments that unfold in front of her, she can’t help but continue to step through those doors?" muses Enos. "What’s the key to why she steps through those doors? It's her moral compass and it's her inability to keep her mouth shut in the face of ignorance, injustice, and people being bad at their job. Historically it’s gotten her in a lot of trouble. Yet, for whatever reason, in this moment in her life, on this crazy red planet, it's what sets her on her hero's journey. And that's very interesting."

The Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated actress admits to loving a good wardrobe fitting to discover exactly what her character is all about.

"From the short hair to the clothes, I kept asking our costume designer Esther Marquis to bring in boxier shapes, more masculine, more heavy, to try embody that sense of her trying to hide and not draw attention to herself," Enos adds. "The weight of the shoes, the belt, all of that was helpful in tapping into her toughness, but mostly she was trying to hide inside of this role. She's a very different creature than me."

Enos is no stranger to the sci-fi genre as she co-starred opposite Brad Pitt in 2013's "World War Z", and grew up watching "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" with her older brothers.

"I remember watching 'The Wrath of Khan' and watching Spock die and feeling impacted by that," she recalls.

"Science fiction is wonderful. I feel like it taps into all our childhood sense of play. Like when we were little, sitting in cardboard boxes and drawing buttons with markers and pretending to be in a spaceship. That question of what's bigger than us? What's beyond? This show is so meticulous. The art direction and everyone's commitment to making the world as real as possible. They built a real spaceship and taught me how to fly it! It's just really fun."

"For All Mankind" Season 5 is now streaming exclusively on Apple TV.

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover has stumbled across an unusual sight: a stack of rocks on the Martian surface.

How did they end up this way? Did Perseverance knock them over? So many questions.

What is it?

Perseverance, or Percy for short, captured this bizarre image of rocks stacked on Mars on May 13(or Sol 1859, the rover's 1,859th day on the Red Planet). The image was captured with the rover's Mastcam-Z camera — a pair of two cameras located high up on the rover's mast, looking almost like a pair of eyes that the craft sees through.

You may have seen rock stacks like this while hiking, and while there can sometimes be reason to knock them over, some serve as important trail markers, according to the National Parks Service.

But this rock stack isn't pointing the way on any hiking trail. Instead, it's sitting strangely on the surface of the Red Planet appearing as three rocks stacked on top of one another, almost like a sandwich, in the middle of the dusty, reddish terrain.

However, it's more likely that what we're seeing is actually one rock that broke apart this way due to wind erosion or being exposed to flowing water on ancient Mars. Based on observations made by NASA's other Mars rover, Curiosity, scientists suspect that winds are the primary force of geological change on Mars, wearing down rocks over hundreds of millions or even billions of years.

Why is it incredible?

This isn't the first strange rock we've seen on the surface of Mars. Everything from a sphere-studded rock to bizarre evenly-spaced rocks and even a striped rock have been found by NASA's Mars rovers, sparking curiosity along the way. Conspiracies even arose when a photo from NASA's Viking mission in 1976 revealed a rocky site that, to some, resembled a human head and face.

While it's fun to explore and entertain the "what ifs" when we stumble across something new or unusual, getting to the real answer can be even more interesting.

No humans have ever been to Mars (yet), so we can be certain a rogue hiker didn't stack these rocks up for fun. But uncovering the true backstory of these rocks and their appearance on Mars can help scientists to better understand the planet's history and inner workings.

Update for May 22, 7:48 pm ET: SpaceX successfully launched its first next-generation Starship V3 megarocket on a test flight from Starbase, Texas on May 22. Our wrap story will be posted shortly.

The Ship upper stage lost one engine but performed most of its planned objectives and landed in the Indian Ocean as planned. The Super Heavy booster failed to perform its boost back burn correctly and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, but it also was not planned to be recovered. See our latest Starship V3 launch updates

There's a lot riding on the debut flight of SpaceX's Starship V3 megarocket — not the least of which are NASA's Artemis moon landing ambitions.

The Starship launch is scheduled to take place Friday (May 22) from SpaceX's Starbase test site in South Texas, during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). An attempt the launch Starsip Flight 12 on Thursday was delayed by a stuck pad hydraulic pin. You can watch the launch here at Space.com when the time comes and see our latest Starship V3 launch updates for more.

The flight will be the 12th overall for Starship, and it will be broadly similar to previous efforts — a suborbital jaunt that ends with controlled ocean splashdowns of Starship's Super Heavy booster and its Ship upper stage. But the vehicle involved is quite new, and SpaceX expects a lot out of it.

A bigger (and better?) Starship megarocket

The 408-foot-tall (124 meters) V3 ("Version 3") is bigger and more powerful than previous Starship iterations, which were already the biggest and most powerful rockets ever built, and it sports a number of other important upgrades as well.

For starters, it's outfitted with the new V3 Raptor engine — 33 of them on Super Heavy and six on Ship — which provides more heft, and a far more streamlined design, than its predecessors.

The V3 Super Heavy also now has just three grid fins (which help it steer its way back to Earth for recovery and reuse) instead of four. And the "hot stage ring" — the structure that marks the meeting point of Super Heavy and Ship — is now attached to the booster, meaning it can be reused, whereas previously it had fallen away during flight. (Starship engages in "hot stage" separation, meaning Ship fires its engines before it has detached from Super Heavy.)

Super Heavy's fuel transfer tube, which funnels propellant from its main tank to all 33 Raptors, "has been completely redesigned and is now roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage," SpaceX wrote in an update last week. This change allows all 33 engines to start up simultaneously and will improve the speed and reliability of in-flight maneuvers, according to the company.

V3 of Ship, meanwhile, "incorporates a clean-sheet redesign of its propulsion systems," SpaceX wrote. "These changes enable a new Raptor startup method, increase propellant tank volume and improve the reaction control system used for steering while in flight. The propulsion updates also reduce contained volumes in the aft end of the vehicle that could trap propellant leakage."

Ship's PEZ-dispenser-like deployment mechanism has been upgraded as well, enabling speedier ejection of payloads. We'll see this mechanism in action on today's flight: Ship will deploy 20 dummy Starlink satellites, as well as two actual Starlinks equipped with special cameras that will scan Ship's heat shield. (On previous flights, Ship has deployed just eight to 10 dummy Starlinks.)

There are other significant Ship changes as well, the update relates. The V3 vehicle "is now designed to be capable of long-duration flights with more efficient reaction control systems, isolation valves for high-pressure gases, 100% vacuum jacketing coverage of the header feed system, a high-voltage electrically actuated cryogenic recirculation system, and a dedicated system for managing cryogenic propellant interactions with the engines during extended coasts in space."

V3 Ship also features four "docking drogues" — small receptacles that allow it to link up with specially modified (and not yet built) "tanker" Ships — as well as propellant line connections enabling those tankers to transfer their fuel. This upgrade is a very big deal, for every Ship headed to the moon, Mars and other deep-space locales will need to be fueled up in space a dozen times or more.

Today's flight will also mark the debut of the second launch pad at Starbase, which features advances of its own. For instance, its propellant farm can load fuel into the megarocket faster, according to SpaceX. And the "chopstick arms" of Pad 2's launch tower, which are designed to catch returning Super Heavy boosters and Ships, are shorter and nimbler.

"Together, these new elements are designed to enable a step-change in Starship capabilities and aim to unlock the vehicle's core functions, including full and rapid reuse, in-space propellant transfer, deployment of Starlink satellites and orbital data centers, and the ability to send people and cargo to the moon and Mars," SpaceX wrote in the update.

Will it really land on the moon?

And the moon is a destination for Starship V3 in the not-too-distant future. If all goes to plan, the vehicle will land astronauts on the lunar surface during NASA's Artemis 4 mission, which the agency aims to launch in late 2028.

Starship will have to check a lot of boxes before it flies that mission, however. For example, the vehicle has yet to reach Earth orbit; all 11 of its test flights to date (Flight 1 launched in April 2023) have been suborbital, as today's will be. It also needs to demonstrate off-Earth refueling and be outfitted with a life-support system and other astronaut accoutrements.

Such milestones must be met soon if SpaceX wants to stay on NASA's Artemis program timeline.

The agency plans to launch its crewed Artemis 3 mission to Earth orbit in mid- to late 2027. This will be a docking test between Artemis' Orion crew capsule and one or both of the program's privately developed lunar landers — Ship (by itself, without Super Heavy) and Blue Origin's Blue Moon vehicle. If Ship isn't ready and Blue Moon is, NASA will presumably go with the latter on Artemis 3, putting the Blue Origin vehicle in pole position for the moon a year later.

Blue Moon has a lot of work to do as well, of course; it has yet to get off the ground. But that could change soon: Blue Origin plans to launch an uncrewed test flight to the lunar south pole with a prototype lander called Blue Moon Mark 1 later this year. It will launch on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, which is also facing its own hurdles. New Glenn's recent NG-3 launch suffered an upper-stage failure, leading to the loss of its satellite payload. Blue Origin will need to fix that issue before Blue Moon Mark 1 can fly.

What if Starship V3 doesn't work?

Failure on V3's debut launch could therefore be a big deal — especially if the fix requires significant modification of a key Starship system or subsystem. SpaceX needs to move quickly at this point in Starship's development and cannot afford many more long delays. (Getting V3 to the pad took a while; Starship hasn't flown since October 2025.)

A subpar flight could also have short-term financial consequences.

SpaceX is gearing up for its initial public offering next month, which is expected to value the company at a record $1.75 trillion or so. A catastrophic Starship failure in the leadup to the market debut could affect that valuation, given how central the vehicle is to SpaceX's future: The company has said that Starship will be its workhorse over the long haul, doing everything from satellite launches to crewed Mars missions to "point-to-point" transportation around Earth.

If SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk is nervous about V3's debut, however, he isn't showing it.

"The Starship production pipeline is full and will complete roughly 10 more ships and about half that number of boosters this year, so, if something goes wrong, it will not be a major setback, unless the launch stand is destroyed," Musk said on Monday (May 18) via X, the social media platform that he owns.

The tallest rocket ever built is now standing on its launch pad ahead of its next mission.

SpaceX is about to debut Version 3 (V3) of its giant Starship rocket, which is poised to launch on the vehicle's 12th test flight. The rocket's two halves, the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, were stacked yesterday (May 19) at the newly-built pad at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas. Starship V3 is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT) on May 21.

You can watch the Flight 12 launch live on Space.com, and follow the mission live with our SpaceX Starship V3 Flight 12 launch updates.

It's the second time the two stages have been mated in the last several days, as SpaceX has rolled Ship to and from its Starbase hangar for extensive prelaunch checkouts and tests. Super Heavy has undergone its own assessments in recent weeks, including test firings of the booster's 33 Raptor 3 engines.

SpaceX shared photos of yesterday's Starship stack in a post on X, and conducted a final wet dress rehearsal on the vehicle, fully fueling both stages and running through a simulated launch countdown leading to the moments just before engine ignition. That was completed Wednesday (May 20).

Starship Flight 12 will be a suborbital launch, with soft landing splashdowns in the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean for Ship and Super Heavy, respectively, rather than a return to Starbase for recovery and reuse. Ultimately, SpaceX has designed Starship for full reusability, and has successfully recovered Super Heavies using the launch tower's "chopstick" arms to catch the booster in midair, but has not yet attempted a catch of the Ship upper stage. Though, depending on the outcome of this first V3 test flight, SpaceX could potentially attempt such a recovery on the upcoming Flight 13 or 14.

You can watch Starship Flight 12 live on May 21, with streams available on SpaceX's website, and also on Space.com beginning at 5:45 p.m. EDT (2145).

Starship V3 is a big upgrade from the vehicle's previous V2 and V1 designs, and features key components crucial for maturing the vehicle for operational missions, including docking ports for in-space refueling. That capability will be needed on future flights when Starship needs to fly beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), like for NASA's upcoming Artemis missions.

NASA has contracted SpaceX to use Starship as one of the Artemis lunar landers, and their deadline to have the vehicle ready is quickly approaching. Artemis 3 is planned for late 2027, and will launch NASA's Orion capsule with a crew of astronauts to rendezvous and dock with Starship in LEO to assess the spacecrafts' ability to link up in orbit. If that's successful, Starship is slated to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on Artemis 4, currently scheduled for 2028.

NASA has also contracted a lunar lander from Blue Origin. Their Blue Moon spacecraft is also expected to fly on Artemis 3 for its own tests with Orion, and, while NASA is hoping for the opportunity to launch the mission using both landers, the agency has said it's willing to fly with just one, if the other stalls in development.

Right now, a spacecraft named Psyche is headed to its namesake asteroid, 16 Psyche. The theory is that 16 Psyche, which lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may be made of precious metals that, on Earth, would be worth more than the entire world economy. However, we'll only know for sure once this probe gets there in 2029. So, we'll have to wait.

But in the mean time, this spacecraft has been keeping us entertained. On its way to that tremendously exciting asteroid, Psyche just made a memorable pit stop: It flew by Mars, getting within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the planet's surface. That's very, very close — indeed, close enough to bring us some marvelous imagery of our neighbor, the Red Planet.

The image of Mars above was taken at about 8:03 a.m. EDT (1203 GMT) on May 15 during the flyby. The planet's crescent shape is due to Psyche approaching Mars from what's known as a "high phase angle," in reference to the angle formed between the sun, the target being imaged (Mars, in this case), and the spacecraft itself.

NASA also explains that one of Psyche's instruments, the multispectral imager, saw the crescent appearing brighter and extending farther than expected due to the dusty Mars atmosphere scattering light. The multispectral imager is special because it can take images in both visible light (light we can see as humans) and near-infrared light (the kind of invisible light the James Webb Space Telescope famously specializes in).

That kind of imaging will be important once Psyche gets to 16 Psyche, because it'll reveal better detail about the asteroid's surface features. In fact, it would appear that a lot of asteroid-specific gear meant to help NASA decode the true composition of 16 Psyche and let us know whether or not it lives up to its proposed price tag of many (many) quadrillions of dollars was turned on during the Mars flyby. This includes instruments like the magnetometers that may have found a "bow shock" on Mars, which relates to solar wind dynamics near the planet.

But to keep our eyes on Mars for a minute: As breathtaking as that crescent is, it isn't the only image Psyche's operators managed to process during the probe's close approach to the planet.

"We've captured thousands of images of the approach to Mars and of the planet's surface and atmosphere at close approach. This dataset provides unique and important opportunities for us to calibrate and characterize the performance of the cameras, as well as test the early versions of our image-processing tools being developed for use at the asteroid Psyche," Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University, said in a statement.

For instance, NASA also released the flyby images below. And agency officials say we can expect further analysis of Psyche's Martian views in the coming days as more opportunities arise.

"As the spacecraft continues its journey after the flyby, we'll continue calibration imaging of Mars for the rest of the month as it recedes into the distance," Bell said.

This image just above showcases Psyche's view of a nearly "full Mars." The white blob toward the left is actually the planet's south pole, depicting a high-resolution view of the water-ice-rich area in this region on Mars. That cap is over 430 miles (700 kilometers) in width, NASA says.

The first image below shows wind streaks over craters on the Red Planet, with the streaks extending to about 30 miles (50 km) in length. The craters average around 30 miles (50 km) in diameter as well.

Meanwhile, the second image below is blue because it's an enhanced color view of Mars, showing Huygens crater, which is about 290 miles (470 km) in width.

As to why Psyche made this little detour on its way to its final target? It's because of something called a "gravity assist," which is a popular maneuver taken by spacecraft headed into the depths of our solar system.

Basically, a gravity assist allows a probe to harness the gravitational influence of different objects in space (usually planets) and slingshot onto a planned trajectory that brings it toward an ultimate target. According to NASA, it would appear this gravity assist of Psyche was as effective as hoped for.

"We've confirmed that Mars gave the spacecraft a 1,000 mile‑per‑hour boost and shifted its orbital plane by about 1 degree relative to the sun. We are now on course for arrival at the asteroid Psyche in summer 2029," Don Han, Psyche's navigation lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement.

Han also explained that the Psyche flight team came to this conclusion by taking advantage of the Doppler Shift effect. The Doppler Shift has to do with the way wavelengths from an object moving away from you stretch out while those from an object moving toward you compress.

NASA's Deep Space Network, which the agency uses to communicate with far-flung spacecraft, is able to tap into this effect and thus figure out the locations of spacecraft. It's also worth noting that Psyche is testing out a cool new form of spacecraft communications that involves laser-beaming information back to Earth with its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) software. That has, so far, been knocking it out of the park — even transmitting an image of a cat named Taters across 19 million miles (30 million km) of space.

"We've been anticipating the Mars flyby for years, but now it’s complete. We can thank the Red Planet for giving our spacecraft a critical gravitational slingshot farther into the solar system," Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the statement.

"Onward to the asteroid Psyche!"

Update for May 22, 7:48 pm ET: SpaceX successfully launched its first next-generation Starship V3 megarocket on a test flight from Starbase, Texas on May 22. Our wrap story will be posted shortly.

The Ship upper stage lost one engine but performed most of its planned objectives and landed in the Indian Ocean as planned. The Super Heavy booster failed to perform its boost back burn correctly and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, but it also was not planned to be recovered. See our latest Starship V3 launch updates

SpaceX's new "V3" Starship megarocket will fly for the first time ever today (May 22), and you can watch the highly anticipated action live.

Starship Version 3 — the biggest and most powerful iteration of the vehicle yet — is scheduled to debut Thursday with a suborbital test flight that lifts off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. An attempt to launch Starship on Thursday was called off due to a stuck pad hydraulic pin, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said.

Launch will occur during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company's website; coverage will start about 45 minutes before liftoff. You can follow the launch live with our SpaceX Starship V3 Flight 12 launch updates.

Though this will the first flight for V3, it will be the 12th overall for Starship. The giant rocket first launched in April 2023 on a suborbital test mission that ended in an explosion not long after liftoff.

SpaceX has made considerable progress since then. For example, the most recent two Starship missions — Flight 10 and Flight 11, which launched in August and October of last year, respectively — were completely successful, according to the company.

On both flights, Starship's Super Heavy booster steered itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket's upper stage, known as "Ship," successfully deployed payloads (eight dummy Starlink satellites in each case) and made a splashdown of its own in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

The goals are broadly the same for Flight 12, with a few twists. For instance, this time, Ship will aim to deploy 20 dummy Starlink craft as well as two "specially modified" real Starlink satellites.

"The two modified satellites will test hardware planned for Starlink V3 and will attempt to scan Starship's heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship's heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 12 mission description.

The entire suborbital test will take a little over an hour, if all goes to plan. Super Heavy's splashdown will occur about seven minutes after liftoff, with Ship following suit 58 minutes later.

There's a lot riding on Flight 12, and not just because it will be the first Starship launch in more than seven months. SpaceX is developing the giant vehicle to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks, and V3 is the first Starship iteration capable of making such trips.

So SpaceX is doubtless keen to see how the vehicle flies. And so is NASA, which picked Starship to be one of the two crewed landers for its Artemis program of moon exploration.

If all goes well with Flight 12 and subsequent test missions, Starship could launch on the Artemis 3 docking test in Earth orbit late next year, and then land astronauts near the lunar south pole on Artemis 4 in 2028. Or, those honors could go to Blue Origin's Blue Moon, the other private lander in the Artemis stable.

Editor's note: This story was updated on May 22, 2026 to reflect SpaceX's Starship V3 launch delay.

A worker died at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas early Friday morning (May 15), as the company geared up for the debut launch of its Starship V3 megarocket.

The death occurred around 4 a.m. local time on Friday, according to the San Antonio Express-News, which further reported that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is investigating the incident.

Local officials have not identified the deceased or provided details about the death. However, The Wall Street Journal talked to sources who said the person was employed by a contractor and died after a fall.

Starbase is the manufacturing, testing and launch hub for Starship, the fully reusable rocket that SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks. The vehicle, which stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.

Starbase is also one of the nation's newest cities; it became incorporated in May 2025, by a vote of 212 to 6.

Starbase has been quite busy lately, for SpaceX has been gearing up for a very important launch — the debut of Starship V3 (Version 3), an advanced, more powerful iteration of the rocket that's capable of reuse and deep-space flight. V3's maiden test flight will be the 12th overall for Starship, which began flying in fully stacked form in April 2023.

Starship V3 was originally supposed to launch from Starbase today (May 19), but SpaceX pushed the suborbital flight back twice in the past few days, most recently to Thursday evening (May 21). The company has not given a reason for the delays, nor has it publicly commented on the Friday death at Starbase.

Starbase has a higher worker-injury rate than any other SpaceX manufacturing or test site, according to TechCrunch, which performed an analysis in 2025 using OSHA data. And that rate is higher than the industry average, the outlet reported.

Starbase "logged injury rates that were almost 6x higher than the average for comparable space vehicle-manufacturing outfits and nearly 3x higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024," TechCrunch wrote. "That outsized injury rate has persisted since 2019, when SpaceX began sharing Starbase injury data with the federal regulator [OSHA]."

SpaceX is currently dealing with a worker-safety lawsuit — one filed by a truck driver, who says he was injured by liquid methane while delivering the rocket propellant to the company's McGregor test site, near Waco, in June 2024.

And, on a tangentially related note: More than 50 people who live near Starbase recently filed a federal suit claiming that Starship launches have damaged their homes.

NASA is testing the limits of future Mars aircraft as it works to develop a next-generation fleet of helicopters that will fly through the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.

In March, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California completed tests on rotor designs that could be used to fly those drones, spinning the experimental helicopter blades fast enough for their tips to exceed Mach 1 (the speed of sound).

A total of 137 tests were performed inside a state-of-the-art chamber that can simulate Mars' atmosphere by replacing the air with a low-density concentration of carbon dioxide. This work provided NASA with valuable data, which engineers say could increase the vehicle's lift capability by 30%, allowing future Mars helicopters to carry heavier science instruments and bigger batteries over greater distances.

The first-ever aerodynamic flight on Mars was performed on April 19, 2021 by NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, a prototype designed to determine if a helicopter could be effective in such a thin atmosphere. The little rotorcraft far exceeded mission managers' expectations, completing a total of 72 flights over the course of nearly three years.

Ingenuity was not built to operate as a full science vehicle, but NASA's next Mars helicopters are being designed to do just that. "NASA had a great run with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter," Al Chen, JPL's Mars Exploration Program manager, said in a May 7 JPL statement. "But we are asking these next-generation aircraft to do even more at the Red Planet."

Teams at JPL mounted a three-bladed rotor inside the modified chamber, which also blasted the blades with wind to simulate flight conditions. They spun the rotor at increasing speeds until its tips eventually reached Mach 1.08 without signs of damage.

Engineers also tested a longer, two-bladed rotor for SkyFall, a mission concept designed to send three next-generation Mars helicopters to the Red Planet in December 2028. The increased length of the two-bladed version allowed the rotor to reach the same near-supersonic speeds with fewer rotations per minute. Those tests collected data that are being integrated into the SkyFall mission team's design specifications, according to the same statement.

"The successful testing of these rotors was a major step toward proving the feasibility of flight in more demanding environments, which is key for next-gen vehicles," Shannah Withrow-Maser, an aerodynamicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, said in the statement.

The successful tests point toward a new class of Mars exploration vehicle, capable of carrying instruments over terrain that rovers may struggle to reach and that orbiters may be too far away to study.

The May new moon arrives this weekend, ushering in several dark moonless nights perfect for exploring the majesty of our Milky Way, glimmering spring constellations and the ever-shifting procession of the planets.

May's new moon phase occurs at 4:01 p.m. EDT (2001 GMT) on May 16, as the moon passes close to the sun in the daytime sky.

The nights surrounding the new moon present beautifully dark skies for stargazers looking to navigate the sea of stars, nebulas and galaxies that haunt the post-sunset realm.

Visible planets

Turn your gaze west at sunset to spot Venus glowing as a bright "evening star" a little over 20 degrees above the horizon — roughly the width of two clenched fists held at arm's length against the night sky.

Jupiter glows another 20 degrees to the upper left of Venus, with Castor and Pollux, the brightest stars in the constellation Gemini, shining above. A pair of 10X50 binoculars will reveal a shoal of star-like objects surrounding the gas giant. These are Jupiter's largest natural satellites Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, which are collectively known as the Galilean Moons in honor of their discoverer, the famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei.

Early birds are treated to an entirely different cast of planets as Saturn shines above the eastern horizon in the hour preceding dawn, with Mars rising to its lower left, chased by the golden light of the coming sun. Both Saturn and Mars will cling less than 20 degrees above the horizon at sunrise, so be sure to find a spot with a clear view to the east if you want to catch the planetary duo before they're lost in the glare of the sun.

Stars and constellations

May's new moon is a great time to spot a trio of celestial animals shining in the spring sky. Our first target is the great lion represented in the constellation Leo, whose mane and chest are represented by a sickle-like formation of stars that shines above the southwestern horizon after sunset in May, with Regulus at its lowest point.

The second-century Greek philosopher Ptolemy catalogued the constellation almost 2,000 years ago, seeing in it the Nemean Lion from the mythological tale of Heracles, which the hero was burdened with slaying as the first of his 12 labors.

Next, look 10 degrees above Leo's sickle head to find the faint stars of the constellation Leo Minor, the "little lion". This constellation was created by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in the year 1690. As a result, there are no great mythological tales of its origin, though it remains a pretty feature between the greater stellar citadels of Leo and Ursa Major.

To the lower right of Leo Minor is the magnitude +3.25 star Alpha Lyncis, which forms the leftmost point of the constellation Lynx — a serpentine formation of eight stars that stretches off to the right above the northwestern horizon for viewers in the Northern Hemisphere. Dark skies surrounding the new moon make Lynx much easier to trace, as it is often hidden in the glare of Earth's satellite.

Our final target is the glowing core of the Milky Way, which puts on a magnificent show between midnight and dawn in mid-May, as it arcs high over the southeastern horizon. A good way to spot the Milky Way is by locating the three bright stars Altair, Vega and Deneb, forming a famous asterism known as the Summer Triangle above the eastern horizon this time of year

The dense starfield and dark interstellar dust clouds of the galactic core appear as a glowing band passing through Deneb and between Vega and Altair, as it tumbles towards the horizon.

Read more: Learn the night sky without an app: May's easiest star-hops for beginners

Natural light pollution will be at a minimum, so why not also try to head away from bright city lights to make the most of the monthly pocket of darkness? You can use a trusted website like DarkSky.org to find your ideal stargazing location, along with smartphone astronomy applications like Stellarium or Star Walk 2 to find — or identify — breathtaking night sky objects and constellations in the night sky.

Want to capture your own gorgeous views of our galaxy? Then be sure to read our beginner's guide to photographing the Milky Way, along with our roundups of the top cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

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

NASA's Psyche spacecraft flew by Mars on Friday (May 15), diving closer to the Red Planet than either of its tiny moons. But the precisely timed maneuver was not designed to study Mars,

Instead, the Psyche spacecraft zipped by Mars to use the planet as a celestial slingshot on its journey to its namesake, the metal-rich asteroid Psyche.The spacecraft passed within about 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) of Mars, which had appeared steadily larger and brighter in Psyche's view since early May.

On Friday, Psyche hurtled past the planet at roughly 12,333 mph (19,848 kph), according to NASA. The flyby boosted Psyche's speed and, more importantly, shifted its trajectory toward its destination, the asteroid 16 Psyche, which orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

Scientists believe the 173-mile-wide (280 km) space rock may be the exposed metallic core of a shattered protoplanet — a primordial building block of the rocky worlds whose outer crust and mantle were likely stripped away in catastrophic collisions billions of years ago. If so, the mission could offer humanity its first direct glimpse of material normally buried deep inside planets like Earth.

A Mars assist

Friday's flyby marked one of the mission's most important milestones, conserving precious fuel while placing the spacecraft on course to reach the asteroid in 2029.

The maneuver was an example of one of the most important techniques in modern spaceflight known as the gravity assist. By carefully flying past a moving planet, spacecraft can gain speed, alter direction and conserve propellant, allowing missions to travel farther and faster than rockets alone would permit.

The concept can seem almost counterintuitive, as though spacecraft are somehow getting energy for free. A spacecraft accelerates as it falls toward a planet, then slows again while climbing back out of the planet's gravity well. Intuitively, those gains and losses should cancel each other out.

What makes the maneuver possible, however, is not simply the planet's gravity, but the planet's own motion around the sun.

Mars is hurtling through space carrying enormous momentum as it orbits the sun. By approaching the planet at a carefully calculated angle and departing in another, Psyche effectively stole a tiny fraction of that orbital energy.

The exchange follows Newton's Third Law — every action has an equal and opposite reaction — as the spacecraft gains momentum by borrowing an infinitesimally small amount from Mars, a transfer imperceptible to the planet but transformative for the mission.

"It's smart, it's cheap, and it's phenomenally clever … it's a bit like interplanetary billiards," Shadan Ardalan, a NASA scientist who was involved with the agency's Juno mission to Jupiter, previously told Space.com.

Gravity assists have long been used to explore humanity's cosmic backyard. The technique dates back to the dawn of the Space Age in 1959, when the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 used the moon's gravity to swing behind it and photograph the lunar far side for the first time.

Many of humanity's most ambitious robotic missions would also have been impossible without such maneuvers. NASA's Voyager probes famously used a once-every-176-years alignment of the outer planets in the late 1970s to slingshot from Jupiter to Saturn, with Voyager 2 continuing onward to Uranus and Neptune in a historic grand tour of the outer solar system. Cassini relied on gravity assists with Earth, Venus and Jupiter to build up the speed needed to reach Saturn, while New Horizons swung past Jupiter to shave a few years off its journey to Pluto.

Most recently, NASA's historic Artemis 2 mission adopted a similar principle, following a “free-return” trajectory that used the moon's gravity to arc the crew of four back toward Earth without requiring major engine burns after looping around the lunar far side.

On to the asteroid belt

On Friday, the Mars encounter gave Psyche the equivalent of roughly a 2-kilometer-per-second change in velocity relative to the sun, according to a paper published in October detailing the maneuver.

Psyche uses solar-electric propulsion, relying on its solar panels to convert sunlight into electricity and slowly push the spacecraft forward by releasing charged xenon gas. The system is highly efficient, but it generates only a small amount of thrust over long periods of time.

Achieving the same boost in speed and shift in trajectory using propulsion alone would have been extraordinarily expensive and likely impractical, requiring enormous amounts of propellant — more than the spacecraft could realistically carry — while also adding weight and dramatically increasing launch costs.

The Mars flyby allowed the spacecraft to use the planet's gravity to do much of the work instead, saving fuel for the rest of the journey.

Like a baseball launched off a bat, Psyche now leaves Mars carrying new momentum and a reshaped trajectory, bound for a metallic world that may reveal what lies hidden inside planets themselves. It should arrive at asteroid 16 Psyche in July 2029.

Stunning new images from Europe's Mars Express orbiter reveal a rugged Martian landscape carved by catastrophic floods that once tore across the Red Planet billions of years ago.

The dramatic new view, released by the European Space Agency (ESA) on May 13, spotlights Shalbatana Vallis, a sprawling Martian channel system near the planet's equator that stretches roughly 800 miles (1,300 kilometers, or about the length of Italy. The image was taken by Mars Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), highlighting what planetary scientists call "chaotic terrain," according to a statement from the space agency.

Chaotic terrain is characterized by fractured, jumbled blocks of rock thought to have formed when underground ice melted and caused the surface above to collapse. In Shalbatana Vallis, the landscape sits alongside winding valleys gouged out by immense floods that once surged across Mars around 3.5 billion years ago.

"This kind of terrain is common on Mars, and has been captured before by Mars Express," ESA officials said in the statement.

Researchers believe huge quantities of groundwater likely burst onto the surface in a series of catastrophic floods that surged downhill and rapidly carved the waterworn valleys visible today. The main channel seen in the images measures about 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide and plunges roughly 1,640 feet (500 meters) deep.

The recent images also reveal layers of Mars' complex geological past across the region, suggesting Shalbatana Vallis may once have been even deeper before gradually filling in with sediments, ash and other material over time. Dark blue-black deposits scattered through the valley are thought to be volcanic ash redistributed by Martian winds, while impact craters, wrinkle ridges and isolated mesas point to repeated cycles of catastrophic flooding, lava flows and erosion spanning billions of years.

Scientists are especially interested in regions like Shalbatana Vallis because they preserve evidence that Mars was once far warmer and wetter than it is today. The channel empties toward Chryse Planitia, one of the lowest regions on Mars, where some researchers have proposed an ancient ocean may once have existed, according to the statement.

Launched in 2003, Mars Express remains one of the longest-running missions still operating at Mars, with its HRSC mapping the Red Planet in color and 3D for more than two decades. Over the course of its mission, the spacecraft has played a major role in uncovering evidence of Mars' watery past, mapping minerals formed in water, studying buried ice deposits and even contributing to controversial findings suggesting possible liquid water beneath the planet's southern polar ice cap.

Is it an eclipse? An oddly angled crescent moon, perhaps? Nope. This stunning silver arc is actually Mars.

The breathtaking new image of the Red Planet was captured by the NASA spacecraft Psyche as it heads for a close encounter with Earth's planetary neighbor on Friday (May 15).

NASA shared the image captured late on Wednesday (May 13) on its NASA Solar System X feed. The space agency wrote: "This is not an eclipse, but an even more rare sight: a crescent Mars as seen by NASA’s #MissionToPsyche spacecraft. The unprocessed image — taken by Psyche today — shows the night side of Mars as the spacecraft approaches the Red Planet for a flyby on May 15."

NASA explained the glowing crescent is actually sunlight being reflected from the day side of the Martian surface, with a contribution from sunlight passing through the atmosphere of Mars. The space agency continued: "The irregularities in the crescent are likely caused by surface features, and dust and clouds in the atmosphere."

As Space.com previously reported on Friday (May 15), Psyche will come within around 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) of Mars travelling at a speed of 12,333 miles per hour (19,848 kph).

This will allow it to capture some stunning images of Mars and, in the process, calibrate the spacecraft's observational instruments, work which began on May 3. This will verify that Psyche will be ready to collect vital data when it reaches the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, home of its primary target a metal-rich 173-mile-wide (280 km) asteroid called asteroid 16 Psyche, (or just Psyche).

This isn't just a sightseeing tour, howver. The main aim of Psyche's Mars flyby will be to grab a gravity assist from the Red Planet.

This will boost the spacecraft's speed and alter its trajectory enabling the mission which launched in October 2023 to reach its asteroid namesake in 2029.

NASA's Perseverance rover pauses along the western rim of Mars' ancient Jezero Crater in a striking new image, taking in sweeping rocky cliffs and windswept terrain stretching across the Red Planet's rugged landscape.

A newly released selfie shows the robotic explorer against a dramatic backdrop of ancient Martian terrain in a region known as "Lac de Charmes." The rover appears perched on a jagged outcrop, with the western rim of Jezero Crater in the distance. The image, assembled from 61 individual photographs, captures Perseverance beside a freshly drilled abrasion patch as it studies some of the oldest rocks scientists have encountered during the mission, according to a statement from NASA.

The selfie was taken on March 11 during the rover's 1,797th Martian day, or sol, on Mars. The image marks Perseverance's deepest journey yet into the western frontier beyond Jezero Crater — terrain scientists see as a valuable window into Mars' distant past.

"What I see in this image is [an] excellent exposure of likely the oldest rocks we are going to investigate during this mission," Ken Farley, Perseverance's deputy project scientist at California Institute of Technology, said in the statement. "There is a sharp ridgeline visible in the mosaic whose jagged, angular texture contrasts starkly with the rounded boulders in the foreground. We also see a feature that may be a volcanic dike, a vertical intrusion of magma that hardened in place and was left standing as the softer surrounding material eroded away over billions of years."

In the new selfie, Perseverance appears to "look" directly into the camera, while its robotic arm — which carries the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and engineering) camera used to capture the images — remains hidden outside the stitched frame. The result is a remarkable portrait of the robotic explorer amid Mars' rugged wilderness.

Perseverance has recently been traversing especially ancient and scientifically valuable terrain along the crater rim. Researchers believe these rocky outcrops could preserve clues about Mars' early crust, environmental history and whether the planet once hosted microbial life.

The rover's latest travels have taken it through landscapes filled with fractured rocks, ridges and mineral-rich formations likely shaped billions of years ago when water flowed across the region. Jezero Crater itself is thought to have once contained an ancient lake and river delta, making it one of the prime locations on Mars to search for signs of ancient habitability.

Perseverance also recently captured a panoramic view of the Lac de Charmes region on April 5, or Sol 1882, using its Mastcam-Z instrument. The mosaic of an area known as "Arbot" was assembled from 46 images and reveals one of the richest geological vistas of the mission, according to the statement.

Since landing inside Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has been collecting rock samples for eventual return to Earth while searching for evidence that microbial life may once have existed on Mars. The rover's newest selfie combines artistry with science, giving researchers a detailed look at its surroundings, hardware condition and geological targets.

There are plenty of reasons to get excited about Tuesday's (May 19) planned test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket.

For starters, it will be the first launch of Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — in nearly seven months. And, while the mission will be Starship's 12th overall, it will mark the debut of the advanced new V3 vehicle, which features a number of important modifications and upgrades compared to its predecessors. (That helps explain the long launch lacuna.)

Finally, while Starship will fly a familiar suborbital trajectory on Flight 12, it will do something completely new while it's up there — take a good, long look at itself.

The Flight 12 plan calls for Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, to deploy 22 dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband spacecraft. These will be "similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 12 mission description.

That's an important detail: SpaceX has said that one of Starship's main tasks when it comes online will be to finish building out the Starlink megaconstellation. (Other key jobs will be ferrying astronauts to the lunar surface for NASA's Artemis program and helping set up a colony on Mars.)

That number marks a considerable increase over previous Starlink flights, during which Ship has carried eight or 10 such mass simulators. And there's another important difference as well — the Flight 12 dummy-Starlink batch includes two inspector spacecraft.

"The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship's heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship's heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions," SpaceX wrote in the mission description. "Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test."

This focus on the heat shield should not come as much of a surprise. After all, protecting returning spacecraft from the intense heat and other rigors of atmospheric reentry is a tough task, as we learned in the leadup to NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission with all the discussion about the Orion capsule's heat shield.

And protecting Starship is far harder, given that the vehicle is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Each Orion capsule's heat shield has to do its job just once, but each Ship vehicle will eventually launch and return to Earth multiple times per day, if all goes according to plan.

Indeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has flagged Ship's heat shield, which consists of about 40,000 hexagonal tiles, as the biggest hurdle facing the vehicle at the moment.

"The single biggest remaining problem for Starship? It's having the heat shield be reusable," Musk said in February on the Dwarkesh Podcast.

"No one has ever made a reusable orbital heat shield," he added. "So, the heat shield's got to make it through the ascent phase without shucking a bunch of tiles, and then it's got to come back in and also not lose a bunch of tiles or overheat the main airframe."

Ship's heat shield has done its job before; the vehicle has survived the journey back to Earth and splashed down softly in the ocean on multiple previous test flights. But improvement will be needed to get Starship where SpaceX wants it to go, according to Musk.

Ship lost a lot of tiles during on those previous flights, so "it was not reusable without a lot of work," the world's richest person said on the podcast. "If you want to be able to land it, refill propellant and fly again, you can't do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles type of thing."

If all goes to plan on Tuesday, Starship's first stage, a giant booster called Super Heavy, will steer itself to a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. (There will be no dramatic catch of the booster by the launch tower's "chopstick" arms, as we've seen on several previous flights.)

Ship, meanwhile, will splash down in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after launch, as it has done multiple times before. But we should get some new, in-space views of the heat shield before that, giving us some clues in real time about how the harrowing reentry may go.

You'll have to crane your neck just a little farther to look up at SpaceX's new Starship rocket.

The company is gearing up for the planned May 19 debut launch of Version 3 (V3) of Starship, which has undergone a complete design overhaul since its last liftoff seven months ago.

The first fully stacked Starship rocket, which flew the combined Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, launched in April 2023. Three years and 10 additional test flights later, SpaceX has introduced Starship V3 — the culmination of successes, failures and lessons learned over those 11 launches. The rocket's new, refined design is more powerful, more resilient and more capable than its antecedent iterations, and a step closer to a fully reusable launch vehicle.

Starship V3 will also launch from SpaceX's newest pad, the second the company has erected at its Starbase site in South Texas. The upgraded hardware is meant to mature Starship's design, moving the vehicle from test flights toward an operational architecture that can support the rapid reuse, high flight rates and orbital refueling necessary for missions like the ones Starship plans to fly for NASA's Artemis program, which will land astronauts on the moon.

V3 stands about 5 feet (1.5 meters) taller than previous Starship builds and packs a much heavier punch. Both stages —Super Heavy and Ship — have been equipped with SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engine — sleeker, more powerful and more reliable upgrades over the previous Raptor 2. For the Super Heavy booster, that means 33 engines firing with a combined thrust of over 18 million pounds at liftoff.

The V3 Super Heavy has three grid fins — lattice-like structures that help it steer back to Earth for pinpoint touchdowns — rather than the previous four, according to a May 12 SpaceX update. Each one is about 50% larger than before and situated lower on the booster's trunk to avoid heat from "hot-fire" staging procedures when separating from its Ship counterpart in flight. (A "hot stage" separation means Ship begins firing its engines before actually separating from Super Heavy). The vehicle's hot stage ring has also been redesigned and attached to the top of the booster; the Starship V2 hot stage ring was an interstage piece that detached from both vehicles and fell back to Earth during flight.

Inside Super Heavy, a redesigned fuel transfer tube that's now "roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage" will allow the booster's 33 Raptor 3s faster and simultaneous ignitions for launch and landing burns, according to the update. SpaceX also made changes to the aft end of the rocket that supports those engines to better protect the area from heat with tightened integration of its fuel transfer, power and computer systems.

The Ship upper stage has a list of upgrades as well, including plumbing and wiring layout changes in its own aft section, a larger propellant tank and an improved reaction control system. SpaceX also made significant improvements to how Ship handles cryogenic fuels, adding four docking ports along Starship's body and a dedicated system for managing cryogenic propellant in zero-g.

Storing the spacecraft's cryogenic propellants and transferring them between vehicles is a capability SpaceX has yet to attempt, but it's a critical technology for Starship's design. For Ship to fly beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), the spacecraft will require refueling missions using other Starships to top off its tanks. And it's an ability that SpaceX needs to demonstrate soon if it wants to meet NASA's timeline for landing astronauts on the moon (in late 2028, on the Artemis 4 mission, if all goes to plan).

SpaceX is one of two companies contracted to provide lunar landers for the Artemis program, and it needs to meet NASA's qualifications for crewed flights before astronauts can fly on board Starship. That includes the aforementioned cryogenic fuel challenges, as well as the completion of an uncrewed moon landing and launch back safely to lunar orbit, where, on an actual mission, it would rendezvous and transfer astronauts back aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft.

NASA is targeting late 2027 for the Artemis 3 mission, which will launch Orion to LEO to practice docking procedures with Starship and/or the Artemis program's other lander, Blue Origin's Blue Moon. NASA has indicated a willingness to fly with either or both landers, depending on their respective readiness when it comes time for the mission.

So there's a lot riding the upcoming debut flight of Starship V3. A successful mission would include the deployment of 22 Starlink mass simulator payloads, upgraded heat tile dispersion and testing (which involves cameras on two of the simulator payloads inspecting Ship's underside for missing or damaged tiles), an in-space relight of a Ship Raptor 3, various test maneuvers to stress Ship during reentry, and deceleration burns of both stages for soft, offshore landing splashdowns. It's a long list, and any setbacks could have deep implications for both SpaceX and NASA.

Starship launches could soon be an international affair.

SpaceX revealed on Tuesday (May 12) that it's hunting for additional launch sites for Starship, the giant rocket it's developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

And some of those sites may be on foreign shores. "It's no secret that we intend to launch Starship a lot, targeting thousands of flights per year. That cadence will require the ability to launch from many different locations, so we are constantly exploring to find viable sites to expand Starship operations in the future, both domestically and internationally," the company wrote via X on Tuesday.

Those words addressed a May 4 post by X user S.E. Robinson, Jr., which discussed a rumor that SpaceX plans to acquire 212 square miles (550 square kilometers) of land in coastal Louisiana.

"At the southeast corner of the land near the Freshwater City boat launch is a plot ready to be converted for port operations and direct access to the Intercoastal Canal and the Gulf of America," Robinson wrote.

He also noted that the plot is about halfway between Boca Chica, Texas and Cape Canaveral, Florida. Boca Chica is home to Starbase, SpaceX's Starship manufacturing hub and the sole current launch site for the megarocket. (All 11 Starship test flights to date have lifted off from Starbase.)

And SpaceX is modifying three pads in the Cape Canaveral area — Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Launch Complex 37-A and 37-B at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station — to accommodate Starship launches. The huge vehicle could lift off from the Sunshine State for the first time later this year, if all goes to plan.

Starbase sports two launch mounts, the second of which will see its first action as soon as next Tuesday (May 19), when Starship Flight 12 is scheduled to lift off.

That suborbital test flight will also mark the debut of Starship Version 3, a bigger and more advanced iteration of the megarocket. Starship V3 is the first variant capable of flying to the moon and other deep-space destinations, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.

That makes five Starship launch pads that are officially in the works at the moment. But if the company is serious about launching thousands of Starship missions per year — and Musk has said that type of cadence will be necessary to build settlements on Mars — then more jumping-off points will be needed, as SpaceX's May 12 tweet makes clear.

And it's important to note: It would be much easier, from a logistical and legal standpoint, to develop additional launch sites domestically than overseas. The U.S. government regards rockets as sensitive national-security technology and therefore subjects launches to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations framework, known as ITAR.

American companies wishing to fly from foreign soil therefore have to jump through a number of bureaucratic hoops. The process is streamlined via the signing of a Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) at the nation-to-nation level. So maybe we should be on the lookout for SpaceX purchases in countries like Norway, New Zealand, Australia, the U.K. and Brazil, all of whom have inked TSAs with the U.S.

Indeed, American rockets already fly from New Zealand: The Land of the Long White Cloud hosts the primary launch site for California-based Rocket Lab, which operates Electron, the second-busiest launcher in the world (after SpaceX's Falcon 9).

Update for 7:51 p.m. ET: SCRUB! SpaceX has called off the attempted launch of its first Starship V3 megarocket due to a technical issue in the last minute before liftoff. The next launch attempt of Starship Flight 12 could occur on Friday, May 22, at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), SpaceX says. See our latest Starship V3 launch updates

SpaceX's advanced new Starship megarocket will fly for the first time a week from today, if all goes to plan.

SpaceX is targeting May 19 for the debut launch of its Starship V3 (Version 3), a bigger and more capable vehicle that could help humanity take its first steps on the moon and Mars, the company announced Tuesday (May 12).

The rocket will lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on May 19 during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). You'll be able to watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes.

This will be the 12th flight overall for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. But it will be the first for Starship V3, which SpaceX says boasts many improvements over its predecessors.

For example, the V3 Super Heavy first stage now has three grid fins — lattice-like structures that help the booster steer its way back to Earth for recovery and reuse — instead of the original four. And each fin is now 50% larger and significantly stronger, according to SpaceX.

"These fins include a new catch point and have been re-clocked on the booster to support vehicle lift and catch operations," the company wrote in an update today. "They have also been lowered to reduce heat exposure from Starship’s engines during hot-staging."

SpaceX made many other modifications to Super Heavy as well. For example, the "hot stage" that joins the booster to the Ship upper stage is now integrated into Super Heavy and will not be discarded during flight.

In addition, Super Heavy's "fuel transfer tube, which channels cryogenic fuel from the main tank to the 33 Raptor engines, has been completely redesigned and is now roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage," SpaceX wrote. "This new design enables all 33 engines to start up simultaneously and faster, more reliable flip maneuvers."

Ship has been altered significantly as well. For instance, V3 features a "clean-sheet redesign of its propulsion system" — changes that "enable a new Raptor startup method, increase propellant tank volume, and improve the reaction control system used for steering while in flight," according to SpaceX. "The propulsion updates also reduce contained volumes in the aft end of the vehicle that could trap propellant leakage."

The new upper stage also sports "propellant feed connections" to support off-Earth fuel transfer — an activity that each Starship will have to perform multiple times on deep-space missions.

V3 Starship is powered by the V3 Raptor, which is more powerful than previous iterations. And the coming maiden launch will also mark the debut of Starbase's Pad 2, which can fuel Starship faster and sports shorter booster-catching "chopsticks," among other modifications.

"Together, these new elements are designed to enable a step-change in Starship capabilities and aim to unlock the vehicle’s core functions, including full and rapid reuse, in-space propellant transfer, deployment of Starlink satellites and orbital data centers, and the ability to send people and cargo to the moon and Mars," SpaceX wrote in the update.

Despite all of these changes, Starship Flight 12 will be broadly similar to its predecessors, according to a mission description that SpaceX posted today.

It will send Ship eastward on a suborbital trajectory. About 17.5 minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft will begin deploying 22 dummy Starlink V2 satellites, an activity that will wrap up about 10 minutes later. The last two of those dummy craft will collect imagery of Ship's heat shield, to inform the development of future missions. Ship will also relight one of its six Raptor engines in space — something it will need to do on operational flights.

If all goes to plan, Ship will splash down about 65 minutes after launch (presumably in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, as has been the norm).

Super Heavy, meanwhile, will steer itself to a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after launch. "As this is the first flight test of a significantly redesigned vehicle, the booster will not attempt a return to the launch site for catch," SpaceX wrote in the mission description, referring to a bold maneuver that Super Heavy has pulled off on multiple previous flights.

Anticipation is high for Flight 12, and not just because of all the upgrades that will see their first-ever action on the launch. Starship hasn't flown since October 2025, on a test flight that went entirely according to plan.

Look to the eastern sky in the hour preceding dawn on May 14 to catch a rare sight, as the moon, Saturn and Mars form a cosmic triangle in the glow of the rising sun, while the ice giant Neptune lurks unseen nearby.

The 8%-lit waning crescent moon will sit low on the eastern horizon as dawn's glow creeps into the sky. Saturn will appear as a bright star-like object to the moon's lower right, while the reddish glow of Mars shines lower still to the left of the pair.

Neptune will also be present roughly 10 degrees to the right of the thin lunar crescent — roughly the width of a clenched fist held at arm's length against the sky — but will be far too dim to spot with the unaided eye.

Mars, Saturn and the moon will all be less than 20 degrees above the horizon at sunrise, so be sure to find a location with a clear view to the east to see them before they're swallowed in the golden light of dawn.

While the cosmic trio will make for a spectacular naked eye target, we advise against any attempt to view them with a telescope owing to their proximity to the rising sun. Remember, pointing a telescope or binoculars at the sun can result in permanent and immediate loss of sight.

In the coming nights, Earth's satellite will disappear from the predawn sky ahead of its new moon phase on May 16, while Mars and Saturn subtly drift away from one another among the stars of the constellation Pisces.

Be sure to read our roundups of the best lenses and cameras for astrophotography to ensure that you're ready to capture the next big planetary rendezvous, along with our beginner's guide to imaging the night sky.

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

NASA's asteroid-bound Psyche mission is headed for an encounter with Mars today (May 15). The spacecraft, which is on its way to an asteroid also called Psyche, will come within around 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) of the Red Planet during the flyby.

This flyby aims to utilize the gravity of Mars to give Psyche a boost to its already impressive speed of 12,333 miles per hour (19,848 kph). This will enable the spacecraft to adjust its trajectory towards the 173-mile-wide (280 km) metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche (or just Psyche), which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The Psyche spacecraft, which launched in October 2023, is expected to reach its target namesake asteroid in 2029, offering scientists an opportunity to study a very unique object. 16 Psyche is thought to be an early solar system planetesimal, a body from which planets formed, that has had its outer layers stripped away by billions of years of collisions. Thus, its exposed nickel-iron core represents a rare chance to study the usually hidden cores of rocky planets.

But the Psyche spacecraft won't just use the gravity of Mars to get a boost that will help it save its xenon gas propellant; the Red Planet flyby will also offer Psyche a chance to test and calibrate the instruments it will be using when it gets to the main asteroid belt.

In order to do that, Psyche's multispectral imager will be used to capture thousands of observations of Mars. This process began earlier this month.

Psyche's operators first began prepping the spacecraft's Mars encounter by performing a trajectory correction maneuver on Feb. 23. This involved firing the spacecraft’s thrusters for 12 hours, increasing Psyche's speed, and refining its approach to the Red Planet.

"We are now exactly on target for the flyby, and we’ve programmed the flight computer with everything that the spacecraft will do throughout May," Sarah Bairstow, Psyche's mission planning lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA statement. "This is our first opportunity in flight to calibrate Psyche's imager with something bigger than a few pixels, and we'll also make observations with the mission's other science instruments."

The team thinks that the Psyche probe may observe a faint dusty ring, or torus, around Mars, which is thought to exist as a result of tiny space rocks, or "micrometeorites," striking the surfaces of the planet's two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and ejecting dust particles into space.

The alignment between the sun, Psyche, and Mars could result in this dusty material scattering sunlight, making it visible to the spacecraft's instruments.

The team will also use Psyche to search for tiny satellites around Mars, a practice that will benefit the mission when the spacecraft hunts for "moonlets" around Psyche when it arrives at the asteroid in three years or so.

"If all our instruments are powered up, and we can do important testing and calibration of the science instruments, that would be the icing on the cake," said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at the University of California, Berkeley.

This tiny capsule was just shot out of a gun at over 2,600 mph (4,200 kph).

While miniature, this space capsule is no toy. It's part of a rigorous testing process for the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars mission.

What is it?

ESA is developing a landing module, formally called the Entry Descent and Landing Module (EDLM), for its ExoMars mission that will carry the agency's Rosalind Franklin rover to the Martian surface. This mission aims to launch in 2028.

To make sure that the EDLM is ready to launch into space and land on Mars, the mission team launched 20 of these tiny models of the capsule on Earth. The little, 3-inch wide capsules were shot out of a bore gun at over 2,600 mph, or nearly four times the speed of sound.

These "micro launches," as I'm calling them unofficially, mimicked the aerodynamics that a Mars capsule would experience careening through the Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds.

Each of these 20 mini capsules launched while outfitted with electronic circuits, monitoring their flight. During their nearly 755-foot (230-meter) flights, the capsules captured important data about their acceleration, movement, trajectory and stability, according to ESA.

Why is it incredible?

These miniature space capsules look like toys, but in these tests, they withstood almost 17,000 g-forces of acceleration.

The tiny robot figurine in this image and the Martian-esque reddish dirt underneath give the capsule the appearance of a fancy toy display. But as cute as the mini capsule is, it's doing an important job.

It is no small feat to launch something to another planet and have it survive the harrowing downward trip through that world's atmosphere, all the while keeping the delicate instrumentation inside intact.

ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover aims to search for signs of ancient life on Mars, and to do that it has to stay protected from the extreme elements of spaceflight by the EDLM. And these cute, strange little capsules are helping, with the data they generate during their superfast micro launches.

A new time-lapse video from NASA's Curiosity rover reveals years of punishing Martian travel, as its wheels churn steadily across the Red Planet's rugged terrain.

The video, captured by Curiosity's right navigation camera, compresses more than six years of driving into about two minutes. Spanning from early 2020 to 2026, the footage looks back over the rover's deck as its aluminum wheels roll across Mars and endure varied terrain ranging from large rocky slabs to fine dust and debris, according to a statement from the space agency.

"Curiosity's team is using this timelapse to watch for sand grains shifting on the rover's deck," officials said in the NASA statement. "Distinguishing between sand jostled by each drive and wind gusts can provide new information about seasonal changes in the atmosphere."

The rover's camera wasn't intended to create a cinematic record. It typically points behind the rover during drives, helping mission teams identify interesting rocks and terrain features after Curiosity passes them. But by stitching together thousands of routine images, engineers created a continuous record of motion and environmental change, offering a rare, long-term perspective on what it takes to explore another world.

Now, scientists can even use the footage to study how sand accumulates and shifts across the rover's deck, distinguishing material moved by the wheels from that carried by Martian winds — subtle clues about seasonal patterns in the planet's thin atmosphere.

The video also highlights a more hard-won reality of Mars exploration: wear and tear. Curiosity's six wheels, each about 20 inches (50 centimeters) in diameter, were designed to handle sharp and uneven ground. Yet the Martian surface has proven harsher than expected. Not long after landing in 2012, engineers began noticing damage to the thin aluminum wheels, including punctures and tears caused by jagged rocks.

Over time, images released by NASA have shown the damage becoming more pronounced. Close-up photos reveal dents, holes and large gashes, some cutting through the wheel skin. Photos released in 2024 showed fresh scars alongside older ones, underscoring the cumulative effects of more than a decade on Mars. Despite this, the rover remains fully mobile — a testament to both its design and careful driving strategies developed by mission engineers.

Keeping Curiosity on a safe and sustainable course includes plotting routes that avoid particularly hazardous terrain whenever possible. Lessons learned from the rover's wheel damage have not only helped guide Curiosity's mission but have also shaped the design of newer Mars rovers, including Perseverance rover, whose wheels were reinforced to better withstand the planet's unforgiving surface.

What makes the new time-lapse especially striking is the sense of time it conveys. Since its landing, Curiosity has traveled more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) across Gale Crater, climbing the lower slopes of Mount Sharp and traversing layers of rock that record billions of years of Martian history. The battered, dust-coated wheels seen turning in the video are physical evidence of that journey — each rotation marking another step in a mission that has far exceeded its original two-year lifespan.

That longevity has paid off scientifically. Curiosity has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of Mars, confirming that ancient environments in Gale Crater could have supported microbial life. The rover has identified evidence of long-lived lakes, measured key chemical ingredients and, in recent years, detected increasingly complex organic molecules preserved in Martian rocks.

The new time-lapse video offers a mesmerizing record of endurance and discovery — a reminder that even the simplest perspective, a camera aimed at a set of worn wheels, can capture the scale of a robotic mission that continues to push the boundaries of exploration on another planet.

After "re-booting" the moon and establishing a base there, followed by dispatching expeditionary crews to Mars, where should humanity go?

Next month, a first-of-its-kind gathering will blueprint an eventual crewed trek to tantalizing Titan, the largest of Saturn's many moons. That inaugural "Humans to Titan Summit" will make the case for an astronaut outing to that far-off moon, detailing the science goals and concepts of human missions to Titan as well as necessary forerunner robotic efforts.

And there is already a robotic Titan mission on the books — NASA's nuclear-powered Dragonfly octocopter mission, which is targeted to launch in 2028. Could it help fuel a human leap?

Foundational talks

"It's not too soon to begin thinking about this," said Amanda Hendrix, director of the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. She is also president of the advocacy group Explore Titan and co-author of "Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets" (Pantheon Books, 2016).

"The idea of the summit is to bring together people from different communities — engineers, scientists, industry, academia, robotic and human spaceflight experts," Hendrix told Space.com. "We're having foundational talks about what precursor missions do we need in order to get us on the road to Titan, eventually with humans."

Hendrix noted that, after Apollo's last human foray to the moon in 1972, there was a gap of decades, a lull in launching astronauts beyond Earth orbit — a pause just filled by NASA's recent Artemis 2 mission, which sent four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth.

"Now we are, hopefully, back on track [with] humans going to the moon, with NASA talking about Mars as the next human destination," said Hendrix. "I think having a concept in our mind after Mars can guide our thinking, give us a path and keep us motivated for the future."

Visits, past and future

The Saturn moon has had visitors already. On Jan. 14, 2005, the European Space Agency's robotic Huygens probe — part of the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn — touched down on Titan.

Making a 2.5-hour descent through Titan's atmosphere, the Huygens probe provided a stream of data for 72 minutes once on the moon's surface. It set the still-standing record as the most distant landing from Earth.

"Huygens showed us many things," Hendrix said. She cited the dynamics of Titan's atmosphere, the look of its surface — which features water-ice "rocks," dry river beds, lakes and dunes — as well as the overall haziness at the landing locale.

"It does look otherworldly," Hendrix said.

Next up for Titan is Dragonfly, now scheduled to launch no earlier than 2028 for a six-year voyage to Titan. Once landed, the craft will spend three years flying from spot to spot to investigate a range of sites, perhaps revealing its potential to host life.

A dynamic world

"Dragonfly is an awesome, super-important mission to a fascinating and active world," said Hendrix. "Titan is not a static place. It is a dynamic world," she said, "probably a place that's very close to an early-Earth kind of environment."

Dragonfly will give us a leg up in the effort to send humans to Titan, Hendrix said, "but there's still a lot to do and learn."

"Ultimately, we're trying to get humans on the surface and living there. I think that's doable in the long-term, for sure," she said. A precursor mission might involve robotic orbiting of Titan — perhaps even a human crew circuiting the Saturn moon. Radar and infrared scanning of its surface could be done, she said, along with gauging what impact Titan's changing seasons have on the moon's atmosphere.

"A lot can be done, and should be done, robotically. But with humans on the surface, there's work only humans can do," Hendrix said.

Surmountable issues

So, how best to strut the right stuff on Titan?

First, there's more atmospheric pressure than here on Earth. "You don't need a pressure suit like you do on the moon or Mars. What you do need to do is keep warm. It's very cold there. There's also a little more gravity than the Earth's moon," said Hendrix.

Because of Titan's atmosphere, "you can strap wings to your arms and move through the atmosphere under your own power, or strap on a jet pack and power yourself around. You've got that atmosphere and low gravity. There are many options for transport on Titan, which Dragonfly is taking advantage of," Hendrix said.

Also, you'd have to make your own oxygen, Hendrix said, which is not available in Titan's thick, nitrogen atmosphere laced with methane. A Titan-based habitat would need a power source. And, given the precipitation of molecules and gunk that rains down and settles on the surface, there's a need to protect equipment, she said.

"This is all surmountable," said Hendrix, saying that Dragonfly and other precursor missions could yield information useful for human visits to Titan.

The Humans to Titan Summit 2026 is being held June 11-12 in Boulder, Colorado. The goal is "to explore the concept of Titan as the next human exploration destination after Mars, how it could be done and what we would need to do now," according to the event's website.

"We want the workshop to invigorate the community to think about what we need to do and what the possibilities are … to plant the seed that this is a real possibility," Hendrix concluded.

Can you imagine picking up a lucky penny on Mars?

One rover already has. In this snapshot from the Red Planet, Martian dust covers a penny that has traveled farther than any human (so far).

What is it?

NASA's Curiosity rover captured a surprisingly Earthly image on the surface of Mars. With its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MHLI), the rover snapped a close-up image of a penny. (To clarify: The penny wasn't found there by accident; it traveled to Mars with the rover.)

This image was captured on Oct. 2, 2013 on the 411th sol, or Mars day, of the Curiosity rover's mission on the planet. On the penny's surface, reddish Martian dust has collected over the 14 months that the mission had already been on Mars by that point.

Why is it incredible?

It's neat to see a penny on another planet. It's a (now endangered) relic from our own world minted over 100 years ago, in 1909, feeling the Martian wind dragging dusty debris across its surface millions of miles away.

But this penny serves a surprisingly important purpose: scale. In photographs, it can sometimes be difficult to tell how big or small something is without an object of known size, like a penny or a banana, in frame for scale.

"When a geologist takes pictures of rock outcrops she is studying, she wants an object of known scale in the photographs," MAHLI Principal Investigator Ken Edgett said in a statement in which NASA refers to the coin as a "lucky penny on Mars."

"If it is a whole cliff face, she'll ask a person to stand in the shot. If it is a view from a meter or so away, she might use a rock hammer. If it is a close-up, as the MAHLI can take, she might pull something small out of her pocket. Like a penny."

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have, for the first time, directly analyzed the surface of a planet beyond our solar system,

The James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) exoplanet subject, LHS 3844 b, is a so-called "super-Earth" about 30% larger than our planet and located nearly 50 light-years away. Unlike most exoplanet studies, which focus on atmospheres, astronomers analyzed heat emitted from this planet's surface.

The findings reveal a dark, airless world that may resemble Mercury. Scientists say this kind of direct interpretation of a distant planet's geology marks "the next step in unveiling their nature."

"Thanks to the amazing sensitivity of JWST, we can detect light coming directly from the surface of this distant rocky planet," Laura Kreidberg of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who served as the principal investigator of the JWST observations, said in a statement. "We see a dark, hot, barren rock, devoid of any atmosphere."

Discovered in 2019, LHS 3844 b orbits a cool red dwarf star in just 11 hours and is tidally locked, meaning one side constantly faces the star while the other remains in darkness. The dayside reaches temperatures of about 1,340 degrees Fahrenheit (725 degrees Celsius), the scientists say.

In 2023 and 2024, Kreidberg and her team observed three secondary eclipses, when the planet moved behind its star. Using the JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), they measured the infrared light emitted from the planet's intensely hot dayside and used it to study its surface.

By comparing the signal with known rocks and minerals from Earth, the moon and Mars, the team ruled out an Earth-like crust rich in silica and granite. Such crusts typically form through water-driven geological processes and plate tectonics, which recycle rock and allow lighter minerals to rise to the surface, the study notes.

Instead, the data point to a surface dominated by basalt, a dark volcanic rock rich in iron and magnesium commonly found on the moon and Mercury, the researchers say.

"This planet likely only contains little water," study lead author Sebastian Zieba of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian in Massachusetts said in the statement.

One possible explanation, the researchers say, is that LHS 3844 b has a relatively young surface shaped by recent volcanic activity, where fresh lava has not yet been broken down by micrometeorite impacts. However, such activity is known to release gases such as carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide, which were not detected by MIRI, the study notes.

"If present on LHS 3844 b in reasonable amounts, MIRI should have detected it," the statement read. "Still, it found nothing."

Alternatively, the planet may be covered in a thick layer of dark, fine-grained material formed over long periods by radiation and meteorite impacts, similar to the moon or Mercury. Without an atmosphere, the surface would be especially vulnerable to this process, known as space weathering, which gradually breaks down and darkens rock.

"This alternative relies on longer periods of geological inactivity, thereby requiring conditions opposite to the first scenario," the statement read.

Follow-up JWST observations are planned to further refine the planet’s surface properties and determine whether it is solid rock or loose, weathered material, the study notes.

"We are confident the same technique will allow us to clarify the nature of LHS 3844 b's crust and, in the future, other rocky exoplanets," Kreidberg said in the same statement.

A study about these results was published Monday (May 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy,

A new study suggests the search for usable water on Mars may soon rely on an unexpected tool: drones equipped with radar, flying just above the surface to peer underground in ways orbiters cannot.

Researchers led by the University of Arizona have shown that drone-mounted ground-penetrating radar can map buried glaciers on Earth in remarkable detail, offering a blueprint for how similar techniques could be used on Mars. The work focuses on glaciers in Alaska and Wyoming that closely resemble debris-covered ice deposits identified on the Red Planet, according to a statement from the university.

"If you want to make decisions about where to drill on Mars, you need to know if the ice you're trying to find is under one meter of debris or 10," Roberto Aguilar, lead author of the study and a doctoral researcher at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said in the statement. "That's the kind of information a drone-based system could provide."

For decades, Mars missions have relied on orbital radar instruments, such as the Shallow Radar sounder (SHARAD) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to detect subsurface ice. These systems have confirmed that vast amounts of water ice are locked beneath layers of rock and dust, particularly in the planet's mid-latitudes. But while orbiters can identify large ice deposits, they struggle to resolve finer details near the surface — including exactly how deep the ice lies and how thick the overlying debris may be, Aguilar explained in the statement.

That limitation is critical. For future missions, knowing whether ice is buried beneath a meter of loose debris or tens of meters of hardened material could determine whether it is accessible at all.

The study shows drone-based radar can fill that gap. Flying low over glaciers across Alaska and Wyoming, researchers mapped ice thickness, detected debris layers just a few feet thick and revealed internal structures within the ice. The results were validated with field measurements from excavations and drilling, along with simulations confirming the radar signals originated beneath the debris.

On Mars, similar systems could scout buried ice and map the debris above it, resolving features orbiters cannot see. Instead of drilling blindly, mission planners could target locations where ice lies closest to the surface, providing a clearer picture of its depth and distribution.

"We already knew ground-penetrating radar works, but this was the first time we mounted it to drones and tested how we could put it into practice," Aguilar said in the statement. "For instance, we learned at what altitude and speed the drone should fly, as well as the importance of flying in the direction of the glacier's flow, and how to make sure the radar was properly aligned to detect the ice."

Rather than replacing orbiters or rovers, drones could likely serve as intermediate scouts in a layered exploration strategy: orbiters identify broad regions, drones refine those maps at high resolution, and surface missions carry out drilling and analysis. This approach could reduce risk and improve efficiency by guiding missions to the most promising sites.

The implications extend beyond logistics. Water ice on Mars is both a scientific archive of past climate conditions and a potential resource for future astronauts, supporting drinking water, oxygen production and agriculture. Targeting the right locations could also improve the chances of detecting signs of past life.

The idea builds on NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, which demonstrated powered flight in Mars' thin atmosphere and opened the door to more capable aerial science platforms.

"We are filling the gap between today's orbital observations and a more distant future, where astronauts land on Mars and make observations on the ground," Aguilar said in the statement. "This gives us a way to investigate the glaciers now, from the air."

The study does not propose replacing existing mission architectures, but enhancing them with aerial systems that make exploration more precise and adaptable. By borrowing techniques from Earth-based glacier studies, scientists are turning the detection of buried ice into something far more practical for future Mars exploration.

Their findings were published March 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Is it cake? No, but it's baked to perfection.

In this donut-shaped bag is a massive parachute. And just like the confection it appears to be, it needs to be baked to get ready for Mars.

What is it?

Sitting wrapped up neatly in a donut-shaped bag sits a parachute measuring nearly 115 feet (35 meters) across and weighing 163 pounds (74 kilograms) — and it has to be baked in an oven to get prepared for Mars.

But don't worry, the parachute was given time to cool down and rest after baking (we're serious).

This parachute, made primarily of nylon and Kevlar fabrics, was created for the European Space Agency's ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, expected to launch to the Red Planet in 2028.

Wondering why this Mars-bound parachute needs to be baked? Well, it's part of a mission-critical step known as planetary protection. In short, this step ensures the mission doesn't accidentally carry any hitchhiking microorganisms to Mars.

Why is it incredible?

The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover is expected to spend over two years (at least) exploring the Martian surface while searching for signs of life.

The question of whether life has ever existed on Mars is one that scientists are eager to answer. And, with incredible findings from NASA's Curiosity rover spotting organic material on Mars to NASA's Perseverance rover finding possible signs of biosignatures, we seem to be getting closer to that answer.

But if the life we find on Mars is life we carried there on a piece of Kevlar by mistake, it could have serious consequences beyond just the mission. So, to send a rover to Mars safely, we may have to bake the equipment like cakes.

To ensure that no microscopic critters snuck their way onto the parachute before launch, the wrapped up parachute was placed in a specialized oven in a secure clean room at ESA's Life Support and Physical Sciences Laboratory at the agency's technical center in the Netherlands.

Following a 50-hour preheating process in this special oven, the parachute was baked at 257 degrees Fahrenheit (125 degrees Celsius) for 36 hours. This ensured all the layers and corners of this massive piece of gear were perfectly sanitized.

And, just like a perfectly baked cake, the team gave it some time to cool down after baking before wrapping it up to remain clean and ready to be enjoyed.

NASA has released a pair of sweeping new panoramas from its two active Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, offering a vivid look at how dramatically different regions of the Red Planet can be — and how each mission is uncovering a distinct chapter of Martian history.

The newly released images showcase starkly different landscapes, captured thousands of miles apart by the two robots, which together highlight Mars' complex and varied past. Created using hundreds of individual images, the sweeping 360-degree views reveal how water, geology and time have shaped the planet in dramatically different ways, according to a statement from NASA.

Perseverance's panorama was taken of an area nicknamed "Lac de Charmes" near the rim of Jezero Crater, which the rover has been exploring since its February 2021 landing. The mosaic, assembled from 980 images collected between Dec. 18, 2025 and Jan. 25, 2026, looks out across rugged terrain carved by ancient water activity. The region once hosted a lake and river delta billions of years ago, making it a prime target in the search for signs of past microbial life. Layered rocks and scattered boulders in the panorama preserve evidence of those long-vanished environments.

"These rocks were here long before water filled the crater," according to a NASA video illustrating the significance of the recent images. "Scientists even believe some rocks in this area formed when Mars was still shaping its crust and atmosphere — and massive asteroids were pummeling the planet's surface. This terrain is a time capsule from the earliest period of the solar system."

Curiosity, by contrast, offers a view from deep within Gale Crater, where it has spent years climbing the foothills of Mount Sharp. Its latest panorama, comprising 1,031 images taken between Nov. 9 and Dec. 7, 2025, highlights a network of low ridges known as "boxwork" formations. These surface patterns were formed by groundwater that once flowed through large fractures in the bedrock and left behind minerals that later resisted erosion, creating a crisscrossing landscape for the rover to explore.

Over the course of its nearly 15-year mission on Mars, Curiosity has identified carbonate minerals like siderite that may have trapped carbon dioxide from a once-thicker atmosphere, along with an increasingly diverse array of organic molecules — including some of the largest and most complex ever detected on the planet — pointing to a richer history of prebiotic chemistry than previously known, according to the statement from NASA.

"Each layer is younger than the one below it, creating a geological timeline that records how Mars changed," officials said in the video.

Though the two rovers are separated by about 2,345 miles (3,775 kilometers) — roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — the new panoramas effectively place them side by side, offering a planetary comparison in unprecedented detail. The video shared by NASA also stitches together the imagery, guiding viewers across both scenes and simulating what Mars' ancient past may have looked like.

The contrast underscores the complementary goals of the missions. Curiosity is focused on understanding whether Mars once offered habitable conditions, studying ancient environments that could have supported microbial life. Perseverance is taking the next step, seeking direct signs of past life while collecting rock samples that could one day be returned to Earth.

Together, the panoramas reveal what NASA describes as "two sides of Mars" — not just geographically, but scientifically. One landscape preserves traces of surface water in lakes and rivers; the other exposes the mineral fingerprints of groundwater moving through rock. Both are crucial to reconstructing how Mars transitioned from a wetter, potentially habitable world to the cold, dry planet we see today.

As the missions continue — with Curiosity climbing higher along Mount Sharp and Perseverance scouting new terrain along Jezero's rim — more high-resolution panoramas are expected. Each one adds another piece to the puzzle, bringing scientists closer to understanding the Red Planet's history and whether it could ever have hosted life.

Springtime has arrived on Mars as ice melts on the planet's northern ice cap.

A new photo captured by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals crescent-shaped dunes and melting ice across the Martian surface.

What is it?

This new image from HiRISE, which stands for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, shows the surface of Chasma Boreale, a large valley in Mars' northern ice cap.

Here, ice melts and recedes in the springtime, some evidence of which can be seen in this image.

In this image, you can also see dunes streaking across the Martian surface. They hold information about the winds on the planet, as you can tell the direction of the wind based on the direction of the dunes' sharp tips.

Why is it incredible?

Chasma Boreale is a valley with walls rising up 4,600 feet (1,400 meters) from its flat floor. Hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth, this barren landscape lies at the planet's northern ice cap.

And yet, however icy cold, desolate, or far away this planet is, it feels the change of springtime just as we do here on Earth.

This image is a visual reminder of the similarities worlds share across the solar system, however different they may be.