Space + Science News - CNN

Edition

Edition

Follow CNN

Show Description

Watch the Ingenuity helicopter's first flight on Mars

NASA's Mars helicopter takes its first flight

NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took this shot while hovering over the Martian surface on April 19, 2021, during the first instance of powered, controlled flight on another planet. It used its navigation camera, which autonomously tracks the ground during flight.

NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity successfully completed its historic first flight

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter unlocked its blades, allowing them to spin freely, on April 7, 2021, the 47th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This image was captured by the Mastcam-Z imager aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover on the following sol, April 8, 2021.

Mars helicopter's first flight could happen on Monday

This composite image looking toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp was taken on September 9, 2015, by NASA's Curiosity rover. In the foreground -- about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the rover -- is a long ridge teeming with hematite, an iron oxide. Just beyond is an undulating plain rich in clay minerals. And just beyond that are a multitude of rounded buttes, all high in sulfate minerals. The changing mineralogy in these layers of Mount Sharp suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago. The Curiosity team hopes to be able to explore these diverse areas in the months and years ahead. Further back in the image are striking, light-toned cliffs in rock that may have formed in drier times and now is heavily eroded by winds.

The colors are adjusted so that rocks look approximately as they would if they were on Earth, to help geologists interpret the rocks. This "white balancing" to adjust for the lighting on Mars overly compensates for the absence of blue on Mars, making the sky appear light blue and sometimes giving dark, black rocks a blue cast.

Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built and operates Curiosity's Mastcam. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, built the rover and manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more information about Curiosity, visit http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.nasa.gov/msl.

More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/.

Credit
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Mars didn't lose all of its water at once, based on Curiosity rover find

376713 02: (FILE PHOTO) An astronaut's bootprint leaves a mark on the lunar surface July 20, 1969 on the moon. The 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon mission is celebrated July 20, 1999. (Photo by NASA/Newsmakers)

Space is the final frontier for archaeologists

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at the Axel Springer Award ceremony in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020. Tesla Inc. will be added to the S&P 500 Index in one shot on Dec. 21, a move that will ripple through the entire market as money managers adjust their portfolios to make room for shares of the $538 billion company.

SpaceX wins $2.9 billion NASA contract for lunar lander

July 9, 2013

Mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars projected into point perspective, a view similar to that which one would see from a spacecraft. The distance is 2500 kilometers from the surface of the planet, with the scale being .6km/pixel. The mosaic is composed of 102 Viking Orbiter images of Mars. The center of the scene (lat -8, long 78) shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, over 2000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep, extending form Noctis Labyrinthus, the arcuate system of graben to the west, to the chaotic terrain to the east. Many huge ancient river channels begin from the chaotic terrain from north-central canyons and run north. The three Tharsis volcanoes (dark red spots), each about 25 kilometers high, are visible to the west. South of Valles Marineris is very ancient terrain covered by many impact craters.

Credit
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Quest to land humans on Mars heats up and 5 other top space and science stories this week

The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft is seen as it lands in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan with Expedition 64 crew members Kate Rubins of NASA, Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos, Saturday, April 17, 2021. Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov returned after 185 days in space having served as Expedition 63-64 crew members onboard the International Space Station. Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and two Russian cosmonauts have landed back on Earth

Brood X is almost here. Billions of cicadas to emerge in eastern US

This mosaic image, one of the largest ever taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula, is a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers witnessed this violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054, as did, almost certainly, Native Americans.

Giant radio pulses and X-ray surges are coming from the Crab Nebula

A cast of a T. rex skeleton on display outside the UC Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley. The original, a nearly complete skeleton excavated in 1990 from the badlands of eastern Montana, is at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.

Researchers now have an estimate for just how many T. rex once roamed Earth

Pentagon confirms UFO video is real, taken by Navy pilot

July 9, 2013

Mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars projected into point perspective, a view similar to that which one would see from a spacecraft. The distance is 2500 kilometers from the surface of the planet, with the scale being .6km/pixel. The mosaic is composed of 102 Viking Orbiter images of Mars. The center of the scene (lat -8, long 78) shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, over 2000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep, extending form Noctis Labyrinthus, the arcuate system of graben to the west, to the chaotic terrain to the east. Many huge ancient river channels begin from the chaotic terrain from north-central canyons and run north. The three Tharsis volcanoes (dark red spots), each about 25 kilometers high, are visible to the west. South of Valles Marineris is very ancient terrain covered by many impact craters.

Credit
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Why Mars? The fascination with exploring the red planet

marte fotos volcan olympus mons sistema solar hope ultravioleta perspectivas mexico_00000411.png

Why we are going to Mars