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Europe succeeded in placing a methane-sniffing spacecraft in orbit around Mars today (Oct. 19), but it's still unclear if that probe's piggyback lander made it safely down to the planet's surface as planned. The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), part of the European-Russian ExoMars 2016 mission, slipped into orbit around the Red Planet late this morning after completing a crucial engine burn, European Space Agency (ESA) officials said. "It's all good," ExoMars Flight Operations Director Michel Denis said at a news conference this afternoon. "It's a good spacecraft at the right place, and we have a mission around Mars." [Europe's ExoMars...

The storm is expected to envelop the red planet, and reduce the amount of solar energy available to NASA’s rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity. The storm will also make it harder for orbiters to do their work. Dust storms are really the only type of weather that Mars experiences. They’re very common. Usually, they’re only local phenomena, but sometimes they can grow to effect an entire region. In rarer cases, they can envelop the entire globe. ... Predicting these huge dust storms will be of prime importance when humans gain a foothold on Mars. The dust could wreak havoc on sensitive...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2016 October 5 A Crumbling Layered Butte on Mars Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS; Compilation & Processing : Kenneth Kremer, Marco Di Lorenzo Explanation: What is this unusual mound on Mars? NASA's Curiosity rover rolling across Mars has come across a group of these mounds that NASA has labelled Murray Buttes. Pictured is a recently assembled mosaic image of one of the last of the buttes passed by...

Let's move to Mars You may have noticed in recent news headlines, one company “here” is getting sued by the government “there” for multi-billions and another company “there” is getting sued for similar billions by the government “here.” Is it just a coincidence or something of a “tit-for-tat” game? Frankly, I’m not sure. Perhaps each side has some legitimate reasons to complain.

<p>The Big Fxxking Rocket is fxxking big. At 400 feet tall, it’s the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 40 feet in diameter, a school bus could fit entirely underneath its footprint. It’s more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan Saturn V-the rocket used in the Apollo mission-which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.</p>

Despite the tough challenges currently facing his SpaceX company, Elon Musk has made clear that he’s as determined as ever to get humans on Mars in the next 10 years. “I’m certain that success is one of the possible outcomes for establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, a growing Mars colony,” the SpaceX chief said in a recent interview with Y Combinator, adding that up until just a few years ago he wouldn’t have been able to make the same claim. Musk said that getting “a meaningful number of people” to Mars “can be accomplished in about 10 years, maybe sooner,...

China has its sights set firmly on Mars and is aiming to launch its own rover to the red planet by 2020. New images have today provided the first glimpse of what this rover might look like when it launches at the end of the decade. As part of the announcement, China also launched a competition for members of the public to come up with a name and logo for the rover. China, which is pouring billions into its space programme and working to catch up with the US and Europe, announced in April it aims to send a spacecraft...

Six scientists are close to wrapping up a year of near isolation in a Mars simulation on a Hawaii mountain. The scientists are housed in a dome on Mauna Loa and can go outside only in spacesuits, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported. They manage limited resources while conducting research and working to avoid personal conflicts. Communication is delayed the 20 minutes, the length it would take to relay messages from Mars. Kim Binsted, principal investigator for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, said this simulation is the second-longest of its kind after a mission that lasted 520 days in Russia....

HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, is the largest and most powerful camera ever flown on a planetary mission, sending back incredible beautiful, high-resolution images of Mars. While previous cameras on other Mars orbiters can identify objects about the size of a school bus, HiRISE brings it to human scale, imaging objects as small as 3 feet (1 meter) across. The HiRISE team has just released more than 1,000 new observations of Mars for the Planetary Data System archive, showing a wide range of gullies, dunes, craters, geological layering and other features on the Red Planet. MRO orbits at...

The day Gil Levin says he detected life on Mars, he was waiting in his lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, watching a piece of paper inch out of a printer. Levin snatched the sheet and scrutinized the freshly inked graph. A thin line measuring radioactive carbon crept steadily upward, just as it always did when Levin performed the test with microbes on Earth. But this data came from tens of millions of miles away, where NASA's Viking lander was — for the first time in history — conducting an experiment on the surface of Mars. "Gil, that's life,"...

This November, the National Geographic Channel will take audiences into outer space in a way we haven't seen before. From producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer comes Mars, a six-part TV miniseries that blends documentary and science fiction to dramatize humankind's first trip to Mars in 2033--and io9 is proud to exclusively debut the first trailer.

While astronauts on the ISS have enough space for the work-out equipment they need to help reduce these effects (i.e. muscle degeneration and loss of bone density), long-range missions are another matter. Luckily, NASA has plans for how astronauts can stay healthy during their upcoming Journey to Mars. It's known as the Resistive Overload Combined with Kinetic Yo-Yo (ROCKY) device, which will be used aboard the Orion spacecraft. For years, engineers at NASA and in the private sector have been working to create the components that will take astronauts to the Red Planet in the 2030s. These include the Space...

On July 2nd, humanity's rugged little Mars explorer, Curiosity, automatically shut itself down and restricted most of its functions over the holiday weekend. Fortunately, scientists successfully secured communications with the rover, so all is not lost, and soon their diagnostics will reveal what went wrong. The little information they've received thus far points to "an unexpected mismatch between camera software and data-processing software in the main computer", though they'll know more after a full data dump. It will take some time to draw information across the gulf of space between Mars and Earth, which were only 46.8 million miles away...

Mars is a very windy place--so windy, in fact, that bright, oxidized martian soil is being scoured away by martian winds and dust devils to reveal darker, sub-surface soil with the end result of making the whole planet warmer. Mars is experiencing its own brand of climate change. Is this related to planet earth's greenhouse gas driven climate change? No. Is understanding the process important for our understanding of how planets evolve and change over time? Absolutely. In early April of this year, a young Carl Sagan Center Principal Investigator named Lori Fenton, together with her colleagues at NASA Ames...

HiRISE image of Stickney Crater on Phobos. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Stickney crater is almost half the diameter of Phobos itself. Why did the impact not shatter this small moon? The color picture above is a composite from two pictures taken about 10 minutes apart in order to give the 3-dimensional aspect. A recent Picture of the Day described some of the large-scale formations on Phobos, especially Stickney Crater, but this more dramatic picture, which has recently become available, deserves another showing because it portrays the distinctive features of an Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) event with greater clarity. The...

Asteroid Vesta: The 10th Planet? Discovery Brightens Odds of Finding Another Pluto Nemesis: The Million Dollar Question HOUSTON, TEXAS -- Our solar system may have had a fifth terrestrial planet, one that was swallowed up by the Sun. But before it was destroyed, the now missing-in-action world made a mess of things. Space scientists John Chambers and Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center hypothesize that along with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars -- the terrestrial, rocky planets -- there was a fifth terrestrial world, likely just outside of Mars's orbit and before the inner asteroid belt. Moreover, Planet V...

Phobos and Deimos are both small for moons — about 14 and 7.7 miles (22.5 and 12.4 kilometers) wide, respectively — and sort of potato-shaped. Compared to other satellites in the solar system, they look more like asteroids. As a result, astronomers previously hypothesized that these moons were asteroids captured by Mars' gravitational pull. ...previous research suggested that Phobos and Deimos would have relatively irregular orbits. In reality, these moons have nearly circular orbits positioned near the Martian equator. ... huge impact that previous research suggested created the gigantic Borealis basin in the northern lowlands of Mars, which covers two-fifths...

Curiosity discovered high levels of manganese oxide minerals in rocks investigated at a location called “Windjana” during the spring of 2014. Manganese-oxide minerals require abundant water and strongly oxidizing conditions to form. “Researchers found high levels of manganese oxides by using a laser-firing instrument on the rover. This hint of more oxygen in Mars’ early atmosphere adds to other Curiosity findings — such as evidence about ancient lakes — revealing how Earth-like our neighboring planet once was,” NASA reported. The newly announced results stem from results obtained from the rovers mast mounted ChemCam or Chemistry and Camera laser firing instrument....

Explanation: What's that over Paris? Cirrus. Typically, cirrus clouds appear white or gray when reflecting sunlight, can appear dark at sunset (or sunrise) against a better lit sky. Cirrus are among the highest types of clouds and are usually thin enough to see stars through. Cirrus clouds may form from moisture released above storm clouds and so may herald the arrival of a significant change in weather. Conversely, cirrus clouds have also been seen on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Titan, Uranus, and Neptune. The featured image was taken two days ago from a window in District 15, Paris, France, Earth. The...

BE A MARTIAN! Mars needs YOU! In the future, Mars will need all kinds of explorers, farmers, surveyors, teachers . . . but most of all YOU! Join us on the Journey to Mars as we explore with robots and send humans there one day.