The Curiosity Rover ChemCam Engineering Team was awarded the Citation of Merit by the Explorers Club, a society that promotes exploration and scientific field study.
The NASA Perseverance rover, which has been exploring the Jezero Crater on Mars since February 2021, has recorded the acoustic environment of the red planet for the first time.
After two years of work, a four-function robotic rover developed for use on Mars by a 21-person Space Hardware Club (SHC) team at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System, will be in summer competition at the University Rover Challenge (URC) finals.
Today, Thursday 24 March, the University of Adelaide launched its new Exterres Laboratory. The lab, which is the first of its kind in Australia, is an off-Earth surface testing environment for space technology such as rovers, which are destined for the furthest reaches of the universe.
Planetary scientist Christopher Edwards and his team will use renewed NASA funding for Mars Science Lab Curiosity Rover project to continue exploring the rock record on the Red Planet.
KINGSTON, R.I. – Feb. 7, 2022 – Thirteen University of Rhode Island mechanical engineering students are working with NASA and other prestigious universities on a project that could cut in half the travel time for a human mission to Mars. The project involves nuclear thermal propulsion, which scientists and engineers say can get astronauts to Mars more quickly and safely than they can with current chemical propulsion and technology.
A few specialist microbes survive conditions analogous to those of Mars’ early history, reports a new publication in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science—and this may be thanks to a broad range of adaptations.
More than 50 current employees and recent retirees from ORNL received Department of Energy Secretary’s Honor Awards from Secretary Jennifer Granholm in January as part of project teams spanning the national laboratory system.
Liquid water previously detected under Mars’ ice-covered south pole is probably just a dusty mirage, according to a new study of the red planet led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.
New Curtin University research has confirmed the frequency of asteroid collisions that formed impact craters on Mars has been consistent over the past 600 million years.
Fields was invited to work on the heat sterilization step with researchers from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory based out of California, Nelson Laboratories headquartered in Utah, and Johnson & Johnson based in New Jersey. The research group has been addressing not only heat-resistant bacteria, but individual proteins that, on Earth, can act as infectious agents (e.g. Mad Cow Disease). These biomolecules were chosen for testing as representatives of the simplest, hardiest infectious agents known.
A clay mineral known as smectite could hold a substantial portion of the water missing from Mars, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Scientists warn, without good biosecurity measures ‘alien organisms’ on Earth may become a reality stranger than fiction. Scientists warn, without good biosecurity measures ‘alien organisms’ on Earth may become a reality stranger than fiction.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a concept that would make Martian rocket fuel, on Mars, that could be used to launch future astronauts back to Earth.
Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake.
Researchers measured the potassium isotope compositions of Martian meteorites in order to estimate the presence, distribution and abundance of volatile elements and compounds, including water, on Mars, finding that Mars has lost more potassium than Earth but retained more potassium than the Moon or the asteroid 4-Vesta; the results suggest that rocky planets with larger mass retain more volatile elements during planetary formation and that Mars and Mars-sized exoplanets fall below a size threshold necessary to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics.
Transporting a single brick to Mars can cost more than a million British pounds – making the future construction of a Martian colony seem prohibitively expensive.
Expert Q&A: Do breakthrough cases mean we will soon need COVID boosters? The extremely contagious Delta variant continues to spread, prompting mask mandates, proof of vaccination, and other measures. Media invited to ask the experts about these and related topics.
A new study led by University of Chicago planetary scientist Edwin Kite finds Mars could have had a thin layer of icy, high-altitude clouds that caused a greenhouse effect, allowing rivers and lakes to flow.
While attention has been focused on the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars last month, its predecessor Curiosity continues to explore the base of Mount Sharp on the red planet and is still making discoveries.
Living for nearly 2 months in simulated weightlessness has a modest but widespread negative effect on cognitive performance that may not be counteracted by short periods of artificial gravity, finds a new study published in Frontiers in Physiology.
In a comment published today in Nature Astronomy, Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, challenges assumptions about the possibility of modern life on Mars held by many in the scientific community.
Billions of years ago, the Red Planet was far more blue; according to evidence still found on the surface, abundant water flowed across Mars and forming pools, lakes, and deep oceans. The question, then, is where did all that water go?
As NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover continues to explore the surface of Mars, scientists on Earth have developed a new nanoscale metal carbide that could act as a “superlubricant” to reduce wear and tear on future rovers.Researchers in Missouri S&T’s chemistry department and Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Nanoscale Materials, working with a class of two-dimensional nanomaterials known as MXenes, have discovered that the materials work well to reduce friction.
Following the successful landing of NASA's Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater on Mars, the SuperCam operational teams at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) received the first results showing that SuperCam is in good health and giving its first impressions of the crater.
Researchers reporting in ACS’ Nano Letters have 3D printed porous carbon aerogels for electrodes in ultralow-temperature supercapacitors, reducing heating needs for future space and polar missions.
Los Alamos National Laboratory and France’s National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) will hold an online press conference on Wednesday, March 10, to assess the health of SuperCam, the rock-zapping laser that was developed under the auspices of the two institutions and is now on board the NASA Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars.
A new study that characterizes the climate of Mars over the planet’s lifetime reveals that in its earliest history it was periodically warmed, yet remained relatively cold in the intervening periods, thus providing opportunities and challenges for any microbial life form that may have been emerging.
The new era of space exploration features two Stony Brook University faculty members as part of the development of NASA’s Mars2020 Perseverance rover that recently landed. Distinguished Professor Scott McLennan and Associate Professor Joel Hurowitz worked on the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) that is attached to the arm of the rover. Professor Hurowitz also serves as the deputy principal investigator for the PIXL and is part of the scientific leadership of the mission.
The new era of space exploration features two Stony Brook University faculty members as part of the development of NASA’s Mars2020 Perseverance rover that recently landed. Distinguished Professor Scott McLennan and Associate Professor Joel Hurowitz both worked on the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) that is attached to the arm of the rover. The PIXL is a micro-focus X-ray fluorescence instrument that rapidly measures elemental chemistry by focusing an X-ray beam to a tiny spot on the target rock or soil, analyzing the induced X-ray fluorescence. Both professors have been working on Mars missions with NASA since 2004.
Experimental microbially assisted chemolithotrophy provides an opportunity to trace the putative bioalteration processes of the Martian crust. A study on the Noachian Martian breccia Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034 composed of ancient (ca. 4.5 Gyr old) crustal materials from Mars, led by ERC grantee Tetyana Milojevic from the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Vienna, now delivered a unique prototype of microbial life experimentally designed on a real Martian material. As the researchers show in the current issue of "Nature Communications Earth and Environment", this life of a pure Martian design is a rich source of Martian-relevant biosignatures.
A batch of pills will be on its way into space where they will be placed on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) to test how they withstand the full effects of zero gravity, extreme temperatures and some of the highest levels of radiation found beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
When NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover touches down on the surface of Mars on Feb. 18, a bit of New Mexico will land along with it, thanks to work done at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The IBeA research group from the University of the Basque Country's Department of Analytical Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, is participating in NASA's Mars2020 space mission, which is scheduled to touch down on Mars in February this year.
Thinking like Earthlings may have caused scientists to overlook the electrochemical effects of Martian dust storms. On Earth, dust particles are viewed mainly in terms of their physical effects, like erosion. But, in exotic locales from Mars to Venus to Jupiter's icy moon Europa, electrical effects can affect the chemical composition of a planetary body's surface and atmosphere in a relatively short time, according to research from Washington University in St. Louis.
The most habitable region for life on Mars would have been up to several miles below its surface, likely due to subsurface melting of thick ice sheets fueled by geothermal heat, a Rutgers-led study concludes. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, may help resolve what’s known as the faint young sun paradox – a lingering key question in Mars science.
A new electrolysis system that makes use of briny water could provide astronauts on Mars with life-supporting oxygen and fuel for the ride home, according to engineers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, who developed the system.
Floods of unimaginable magnitude once washed through Gale Crater on Mars’ equator around 4 billion years ago – a finding that hints at the possibility that life may have existed there, according to data collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover and analyzed in joint project by scientists from Jackson State University, Cornell University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Hawaii.