NASA is racing to finish a new Mars rover, and the mission just got a launch and land date. The new rover will leave Earth by August 2020, and in February of 2021, it will hit the surface of the Red Planet to search for signs of life. Read More >>
Late last year, the lander NASA was going to send up to Mars was grounded just three months before its planned launch date. Now, it looks like NASA’s Insight Lander will make it up there all. Read More >>
When NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars in August 2012, millions of people across the globe tuned in to watch. It was the culmination of nine long years of effort — and it went off without a hitch. In particular, we marvelled at the ingenious method designed by the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to lower the one-ton rover onto the red planet’s surface: a hovering sky crane powered by booster rockets. Read More >>
Mars InSight lander was set to blast its way towards the Red Planet just three short months from now. Today, NASA announced that leaks that had sprung up in the lander wouldn’t be fixed in time. The next window to send it back won’t be for two years — and whether it will make it even then isn’t certain. Read More >>
We’re big fans of xkcd here at Gizmodo (who isn’t?), and also of learning about things, so we’re pretty excited for Randall Munroe’s upcoming book of explainer drawings, THING EXPLAINER: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words. We’ve got a sneak peek for you, below. Read More >>
NASA has had some truly bad luck lately, underscored by the cancellation of an ambitious balloon mission due to a leak last week. Even Opportunity, the decade-old Mars rover that has surprised everyone by exploring for more than a decade after its mission ended, is showing signs of slowing down. Now, NASA has a plan to hack it. Read More >>
NASA's Opportunity rover is still trundling across the surface of Mars, more than 11 years after its 90 day mission began. But its software is getting bogged down, so NASA's doing a full system backup, memory wipe, and reboot. It's just like your routine computer cleanup, just from the next planet over. Read More >>
NASA just announced what the Mars 2020 rover will carry to the Martian surface, and one of them sounds like pure sci-fi: MOXIE, a machine that sucks in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and pumps out pure oxygen for use in rocket fuel — or someday, for humans to breathe. Read More >>
Since it touched down in August, Curiosity has been taking tonnes of pictures. We've already seen some of the best shots, but there's hundreds more where that came from. Fortunately, you can breeze through the whole nine months' collection in just one minute. Read More >>
If you want a Curiosity rover of your own but don't quite have NASA's budget, you can save yourself £2,499,999,850 by going with designer Arnold Patrick Martin's beautiful wooden model. It doesn't move, the cameras don't work, and it probably won't survive a trip to Mars, but it's also only £100. Read More >>
Apparently this was an accident, but really? Someone's obviously got a sense of humour at NASA's rover control (or access to Photoshop?). Poor Opportunity, just going about its own business while some pecker takes advantage of its innocent wanderings. It's bad enough it got replaced by Curiosity and left on Mars to die, but this? Maybe it's just Opportunity getting its own back. [NASA via Reddit via HuffPo] Read More >>
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