RED PLANET

The small helicopter that landed on Mars with rover Perseverance has exceeded expectations, flying for the 12th time on the red planet and capturing the landscape like never before.

NASA is looking for volunteers to help them simulate a mission to the Red Planet.

The small helicopter flying on Mars hasn’t just been successful -- it’s been overachieving.

China has landed a spacecraft on Mars for the first time in the latest step forward for its ambitious space program.

For its third Mars flight, NASA's small Mars chopper flew at speeds and distances well beyond what had ever been previously tested here on Earth.

One of the goals of NASA’s Mars Rover, Perseverance, is to test new technology that could support future human missions to the Red Planet.

NASA's experimental Mars helicopter has taken flight.

All systems are “go” for the maiden Mars flight of NASA’s small helicopter Ingenuity this weekend.

And as of Tuesday morning, NASA's small helicopter Ingenuity has survived a cold night on Mars and is nearly ready for its maiden flight.

The most important aspect of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is obviously to search for past life on the Red Planet -- but the most fascinating aspect may take place this week.

NASA is getting ready for yet another historic flight: A 4-pound helicopter is being prepared to fly on Mars. During a news briefing on Tuesday, NASA officials and engineers talked about preparations for the upcoming maiden voyage of the small helicopter, named Ingenuity. AdSee: Part of Wright brothers’ 1st airplane on NASA’s Mars chopperNASA is hoping to fly the small Ingenuity on April 8. NASA’s successfully landed its Mars Rover Perseverance on Feb. 18 this year near an ancient river delta in the Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient microscopic life. AdMore: Check out these new photos from Mars Rover ‘Perseverance’Related: Dream realized: Rochester Hills native named NASA flight director

DETROIT – Tonight is winter’s final night. Saturday will be sunny with cold conditions in the morning and milder conditions in the afternoon. Tuesday will have a few more clouds, and it will be just as warm with highs in the middle 60s. There is a chance of showers Tuesday nightShowers are possible, Wednesday, under mostly cloudy to partly sunny skies. Thursday will be cooler with partly sunny skies.

The landing is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort to explore the Red Planet. (2021 NASA)This is the first 360-degree panorama taken by Mastcam-Z, a zoomable pair of cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSSThis shows the rim of Jezero Crater as seen in the first 360-degree panorama taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover (Feb. 24, 2021). AdNASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Rover Down-Look Camera. The Perseverance Mars rover landed on Mars Feb. 18, 2021.

NASA Mars Rover Perseverance is giving a never-before-seen view of the Red Planet just days after its successful landing. With 19 cameras on board, Perseverance provides a 360-degree panorama view of Mars, visible in a new high definition image of the rover’s landing site. Check out the view in the video above from NBC News, or take a longer look in NASA’s Twitter video touring the Mars landing site below. #CountdownToMarshttps://t.co/9tpv4Vl4lV — NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 25, 2021The Mars rover successfully landed on Feb. 18 near an ancient river delta in the Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient microscopic life. AdAs NASA’s biggest and most advanced rover, Perseverance successfully tackled NASA’s smallest and trickiest target by landing in the Jezero Crater, which is a 5-by-4-mile strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and rocks.

Here’s a look at how NASA’s Perseverance rover will attempt to land on Mars on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021. Dr. Roger Weins, a NASA scientist, explained why it’s so difficult to land on the Red Planet. “Partly because of the very thin air on Mars. But with that thin air on Mars, that only slows it down to several hundred mph, and that’s not good enough to land at all. After that, you have to use retro rockets.

An aerial photograph shows the village of Jezero, Bosnia, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021. It will be a historic day for the 1,000 villagers, who hope that the landing of the Perseverance rover in a crater on Mars will also bring them some earthly rewards. It will be a historic day for the 1,000 villagers, who hope that the planned landing of the Perseverance rover in Mars' Jezero crater will also bring them some earthly rewards. The rover named Perseverance is headed Thursday for a compact patch in the crater that is filled with cliffs, pits, sand dunes and fields of rocks. It seems that hardly anyone has anything bad to say about NASA’s mission to scour the dried-out Jezero crater for evidence of life.

Emiratis celebrate after the Hope Probe enters Mars orbit as a part of Emirates Mars mission, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021. The spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates swung into orbit around Mars in a triumph for the Arab worlds first interplanetary mission. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)DUBAI – A spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates swung into orbit around Mars on Tuesday in a triumph for the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. Amal’s arrival puts the UAE in a league of just five space agencies in history that have pulled off a functioning Mars mission. AdThe success delivers a tremendous boost to the UAE's space ambitions.

Mars will appear brighter than at any other point during the year on Oct. 13, when it will be closest to Earth. “So, a little over every two years, Mars and Earth are closest together in their orbits and, thus, Mars is at its brightest in our nighttime sky. (© 2012 Michael Orso)Blue moon on HalloweenFor the first time since 2001, trick-or-treaters will get the chance to experience a Halloween full moon. A blue moon, by the most popular definition, according to Gross, is when two full moons appear in a single month. “We will have full moons on Oct. 1 and 31, so that means that we’ll have a blue moon on Halloween,” Gross said.

NASA has released 4K images from its Martian rovers. It truly is a stunning new way to see the surface of the Red Planet, even though it’s not video. NASA has an explanation for the lack of video:“Although the cameras are high quality, the rate at which the rovers can send data back to earth is the biggest challenge. Curiosity can only send data directly back to earth at 32 kilo-bits per second. Instead, when the rover can connect to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we get more favourable speeds of 2 Megabytes per second,” reads the statement from NASA.

What would a home on Mars look like? The answers to some of these questions are beautifully imagined in a new exhibition, "Moving to Mars," at London's(CNN) - What would a home on Mars look like? The answers to some of these questions are beautifully imagined in a new exhibition, "Moving to Mars," at London's Design Museum. Curator Eleanor Watson said the designs on show were response to questions about future Mars missions. Astonauts will need space suits, such as the NDX-1, one of the very first designed for Mars, by two University of North Dakota engineers, Gary L. Harris and Dr de Leon.

It has drilled into rocks and soil and taken photos of odd features so that scientists can learn more about Mars and itsLONDON - We may have already discovered the essence of life on Mars 40 years ago, according to a former NASA scientist. "NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life," said Levin in his article. "NASA has already announced that its 2020 Mars lander will not contain a life-detection test," Levin wrote in the Scientific American article. He proposed that the LR experiment be repeated on Mars, with certain amendments, and then have its data studied by a panel of experts. "Such an objective jury might conclude, as I did, that the Viking LR did find life," he wrote.

Now, Curiosity has found sediments containing sulfate salt in the crater, which suggest it once held salty lakes. The new detection of sulfate salts came from sedimentary rocks dated to between 3.3 and 3.7 billion years ago. Gale Crater was created by an ancient impact, then filled in with sediment layers over time. Mount Sharp, the mountain at its center, was created by wind erosion of the hardened sediment layers. The sulfate salts represent a different finding from Curiosity's evidence of freshwater lakes in the foundation of Mount Sharp back in 2015.

NASA's stationary InSight lander is spending two years on Mars learning everything it can about the deep interior of the Red Planet. But it's also providing us with cool details like a daily Martian weather report and, now, a glimpse of what(CNN) - Since landing on Mars in November 2018, NASA's InSight mission has been taking selfies, providing daily Martian weather reports, detecting quakes on Mars and hearing strange sounds. But its heat probe experiment is struggling to burrow beneath the surface of the Red Planet. The suite of geophysical instruments on InSight sounds like a doctor's bag, giving Mars its first "checkup" since the planet formed. But "the mole," or the self-hammering heat probe, has only dug roughly 14 inches into the surface since February 28.

(CNN) - Mars is full of subtle sounds and thanks to NASA's InSight mission, we're finally able to hear them. InSight landed on Mars in November 2018 and placed the seismometer on the Martian surface in February. "You're imagining what's really happening on Mars as InSight sits on the open landscape." The InSight researchers call them "dinks and donks" -- the expansion and contraction of parts inside the seismometer, possibly due to heat loss. The suite of geophysical instruments on InSight sounds like a doctor's bag, giving Mars its first "checkup" since the planet formed.

NASA has invited the public to submit their names to travel aboard the Mars 2020 rover. More than two million names alone have been submitted from Turkey, followed by 1.7 million from India and 1.4 million from the US. The Mars 2020 rover is about the size of a small car and weighs 2,300 pounds. Before it was dubbed Curiosity, the previously deployed rover was known as the Mars Science Laboratory. NASA has launched a nationwide "Name the Rover" contest that gives K-12 students in US schools a chance to name the 2020 rover.

But if scientists discover there was once life -- or there is life -- on the Red Planet, will the public be able to handle such an extraterrestrial concept? The agency's Mars 2020 rover, set to launch next summer, will be the first to collect samples of Martian material to send back to Earth. The Mars 2020 rover, along with the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover, will drill into the Martian crust. The surface of the Red Planet is believed to be radioactive, so if there is life on Mars, it likely lives below ground. Mars 2020 will test oxygen production on the planet and monitor Martian weather to evaluate how potential human colonies could fare on Mars.

(CNN) - Elon Musk founded SpaceX 17 years ago with a single goal in mind, to put people on Mars. For years, his ideas for a rocket and spaceship capable of transporting people to Mars were purely theoretical. Musk has said he wants a spaceship to make its first uncrewed trek to Mars in 2022, carrying cargo. That's why the space industry and its fandom are anxious to hear from Musk, SpaceX's CEO and lead designer, on Saturday. The Interplanetary Transport SystemMusk gave his first in-depth presentation about Mars travel in September 2016 at an international space conference in Mexico.

Here's an artist's conception of the Phoenix Mars Lander on the Red Planet (photo Illustration by NASA/JPL via Getty Images). TripAdvisor is offering the vacation of a lifetime, and its called Experience Life On Mars. The first step toward establishing a human colony on Mars is to replicate living conditions on the Red Planet, the site says. With this aim in mind, we have created a scientific space station deep in the caves of Cantabria. Once youre in, youd be given the necessities for survival, but youd be testing out what human life would be like on Mars.

PASADENA, Calif. - Before humans make it to Mars, NASA will send a helicopter to scope out the terrain. Engineers attached a helicopter to the Mars 2020 rover ahead of its launch next summer. And if it flies successfully, it'll be the first aircraft to fly on another planet, NASA said. The solar-powered Mars Helicopter will be safely stowed underneath the rover until it lands at the Jezero Crater, where scientists believe water once flowed. The craft will detach from the rover and explore Mars from the air while the rover collects samples on the ground, NASA said.

A working prototype of the ExoMars rover at the Airbus Defense Space facility on Feb. 7, 2019, in Stevenage, England. (CNN) - What's the first stop for a rover destined to search for signs of life on the Red Planet? Europe's first planetary rover, dubbed "Rosalind Franklin," has now been built and taken its next step towards space travel. The rover has a clear mission: to find out if there is life on Mars. Mars' surface is believed to be very radioactive, meaning life is unlikely to be found on the surface.

Central Press/Getty Images(CNN) - The Rolling Stones have received just about every earthly honor in their legendary career, and now they are making rock history on Mars. It's the size of a golf ball and was photographed by the InSight lander. The stadium is about three miles from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs the Mars InSight mission. "NASA has given us something we've always dreamed of, our own rock on Mars," singer Mick Jagger told the crowd. "So while the name Rolling Stones Rock is informal, it will appear on working maps of the Red Planet," the NASA statement said.

Now a high-tech camera could solve the age-old question: is there -- or has there ever been -- life on Mars? But the "scientific cameras" have now been installed, which will help the mission determine whether there is any capacity for life on the Martian surface. The Panoramic Camera (PanCam) will be the only UK-made instrument on the rover, according to Airbus. Mars' surface is also believed to be very radioactive. Even if the rover and PanCam can't reveal life on Mars, the UCL team can't wait to reach the planet.

Exercise has become an important part of providing that force for astronauts on the International Space Station. Over time, astronauts staying for six months on the International Space Station can experience the weakening and loss of bone and atrophying muscles. Exercise was developed as a countermeasure to reduce the amount of bone mass and muscle loss. Once they arrive on the Red Planet, astronauts will be dealing with much less gravity than what they're used to: about 40% of Earth's gravity. So, we hypothesized that a moderate daily dose would help mitigate muscle deconditioning in a Mars gravity analogue, too."