Mars

NASA's Curiosity rover provides a beautiful, scientifically appetizing view of what's ahead on Mount Sharp on Mars

NASA’s former director of astrophysics plans to revolutionize space science with agile, privately funded missions

Indigenous methane appears to exist in Martian rocks

Brown University researchers have detected glass deposits on Mars that might contain evidence of past conditions and, possibly, life

On April 30, if all goes well, after running out of fuel to fight off orbital decay NASA’s long-running MESSENGER spacecraft will end its mission to Mercury by crashing into the planet’s surface at nearly 4 kilometers per second.

                  A United States federal agency is not necessarily the first place you think of when it comes to answering some of the deepest existential questions for our species.

Fans of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke know and love his 1979 classic novel, The Fountains of Paradise. The plot centers on efforts of a visionary structural engineer in the 22nd century, Dr Vannevar Morgan, to construct a space elevator connecting the surface of the earth with a satellite in geostationary orbit, almost a kind [...]

A recent article by Samuel Arbesman in the science magazine Nautilus discusses the extraordinary sounding possibility that – just perhaps – a search for extraterrestrial intelligence could be made by looking at our DNA.

              In an idle moment, while staring at a set of solar system data, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to display a set of planetary surfaces on an equal footing, where the overall texture of these worlds was visible (although topography is probably a more [...]

The mission will help NASA understand how the body could handle a trip to Mars 

It's been a long time coming, but this week NASA's Mars Opportunity rover completed the first-ever Martian marathon. After landing on the Red Planet in January 2004 on a mission originally planned to only last 90 days, Opportunity has instead endured for more than a decade, and has taken eleven years and two months to [...]

What I love about the annual TED gathering in Vancouver is the way science coexists along with art, social justice, popular song and the rest of TED's eclectic mix.