The Mission

A new rotor airfoil out of NASA Ames did something counterintuitive — it got thinner and sharper — and in simulation it stretched a single Mars flight from 0.7 kilometers to as much as 18.7. Ingenuity was never supposed to last. NASA's helicopter arrived on Mars in 2021 as a technology demonstration, planned for up to five flights. It flew 72 times before rotor damage ended its mission in January 2024 — and every serious Mars plan since has had to answer the question of what

Four volunteers have spent a full year inside a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat in Houston, living as if they were on Mars — and on October 31, they finally get to come home from a planet they never left. The most important Mars mission of the past year did not launch. It did not need to. On October 19, 2025, four volunteers walked into Mars Dune Alpha, NASA's 3D-printed simulated Mars habitat at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and closed the door. On October 19, 2026,

At 3:41 p.m. ET today (Oct 19), Japan's H3 rocket lifted off from Tanegashima right on schedule — and a little over an hour later, the MMX spacecraft separated clean and is on its way to Mars' moon Phobos. This morning's launch-day preview ended on a caution: a scheduled launch is a promise, not a result. The promise held. The most powerful variant of Japan's H3 — the H3-24L, flying as flight F10 from the LA-Y2 pad at Tanegashima Space Center — carried JAXA's Martian Moons eX

Perseverance has now driven farther than any vehicle on another world — and it did it in less than half the time of the rover it passed, by driving itself. The record fell on an ordinary drive. On October 11, on its 2,006th Martian day, NASA's Perseverance rover rolled 299.6 feet across the surface. That short leg pushed its lifetime total to 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometres) — past the 28.06 miles logged by Opportunity between 2004 and 2018, and past every lunar rover as well.

While NASA's own Mars sample plan sits stranded on the surface, a Japanese spacecraft launching Monday will go to Mars' largest moon, scoop up its soil, and fly it home — with American hardware doing the digging. The most important Mars launch of 2026 will not leave from Texas or Florida. It leaves from an island spaceport in southern Japan — and NASA spends this afternoon explaining why American fingerprints are all over it. At 4 p.m. EDT today, October 15, NASA holds a tele

Mars is not far away on a calendar. It is far away on a schedule — and the schedule only opens about once every 26 months. This month, you can watch it open. Every Mars mission you have ever heard of left Earth inside a narrow band of weeks. Not because launch providers like deadlines, but because the solar system imposes one. Earth circles the Sun in about 365 days; Mars takes about 687. The faster planet keeps lapping the slower one, and the two only line up in the geometry

A student-built gel experiment rode a cargo flight this morning — aimed at one of the hardest gates on the road to Mars. The most important Mars launch of the week was not a Mars launch. At 6:33 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, October 13, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on NASA's CRS-35 mission. The booster, flying for the eighth time, returned about eight minutes later to Landing Zone 40, with sonic booms rolling across th

A tube about the size of a stick of chalk may hold the most important answer in science — and right now, nobody has a funded ride to go get it. In July 2024, NASA's Perseverance rover sealed a core called Sapphire Canyon, drilled from a rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls on the edge of an ancient river valley in Jezero Crater. The rock carries leopard-like spots. On Earth, similar patterns can form through chemistry associated with microbial activity. Members of the Perseverance sc

The next Starship flight is the one where the economics of Mars change forever. Elon Musk has a habit of attaching dates to the future and letting the future negotiate. But what he said Saturday, in a virtual interview at the X Takeover fan event at Giga Texas, deserves to be taken seriously even by the skeptics: Starship Flight 15 is "hopefully" four to six weeks out, and the headline goal is to catch the upper-stage ship with the tower's arms — both stages recovered, both s