NASA has committed to running two competing landing architectures side by side for its Mars Sample Return mission, a strategy the agency has never attempted for a planetary return campaign. The ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Right now one of the most advanced planetary explorers ever built is scouring the surface of Mars. Supported by a team of hundreds ...

As stated in Chapter 8, the proper design and implementation of planetary protection measures will ultimately be critical to the overall success of martian sample-return missions. Mission success can ...

NASA plans to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft toward Mars in 2028, carrying three helicopters designed to retrieve rock samples cached on the planet’s surface. The mission, designated SR-1, would ...

NASA aims to return Martian soil and rock samples to Earth in the 2030s, marking the first such planetary sample return mission. A decision on the mission profile is delayed until mid-2026. Two ...

In what appears to be a jab at NASA, Rocket Lab this week unveiled its own plan to return rock and dust samples the space agency has been collecting from Mars’ Jezero Crater since 2021. NASA earlier ...

NASA’s interim administrator, Sean Duffy, was fired up on Wednesday when he joined a teleconference to talk about new scientific findings that concerned the potential for life to have once existed on ...