A NASA rover streaked through the orange Martian sky and landed on the planet Thursday, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars. Ground controllers at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, cheered and exchanged fist bumps and […]
A week after two space probes from China and the United Arab Emirates slipped into orbit around Mars, NASA’s $2.4 billion Perseverance rover, by far the most complex and ambitious of the three, will plunge into the red planet’s atmosphere Thursday for an automated white-knuckle landing. If it survives the “seven minutes of terror” from […]
After hurtling hundreds of millions of miles through space since last summer, three robotic explorers are ready to hit the brakes at Mars. The stakes — and anxiety — are sky high. The United Arab Emirates’ orbiter reaches Mars on Tuesday, followed less than 24 hours later by China’s orbiter-rover combo. NASA’s rover, the cosmic […]
What’s next in space for the U.S.? Well, it’s been nearly a decade since an American-made spacecraft went into orbit, as the space shuttle program shut down in July 2011. The future will certainly include more space travel, much of it originating in Florida. “We’re actually creating an entirely new process using 3-D printing to build […]