Mars

After an unexpected communications dropout, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is back in business on Mars

NASA’s Mars Sample Return program is the agency’s highest priority in planetary science, but projected multibillion-dollar overruns have some calling the plan a “dumpster fire”

Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook

Mars Sample Return has always been an expensive, high-risk, high-reward project. But now, with realization of the mission’s actual cost and expanding timeline, Congress must commit to fully supporting the effort or risk tanking the rest of NASA’s planetary science program

The genes of microbes living as deep as 1.5 kilometers below the surface reveal a split between minimalist and maximalist lifestyles

A brain drain from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory could pose problems for the space agency’s ambitious science plans

Establishing a permanent Mars settlement in the foreseeable future makes little sense. The weakest reason for doing it is also the strongest—and not in a good way

SpaceX’s Starship—the most powerful rocket ever built—experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in its otherwise successful second full-scale launch, triggering a federal investigation into what went wrong

Fresh investigations find that the Red Planet’s liquid-metal core is smaller than scientists thought

Increasing NASA’s budget would ease pressure and allow it to dream even bigger

Images from each and every spacecraft now orbiting Mars have ruled out a meteorite strike as the cause of a 4.7-magnitude marsquake, the strongest temblor ever detected beyond Earth

NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected valuable samples, but a new report says the plan to fetch them is unworkable