NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is continuing its mission to collect samples despite uncertainty about when or if those ...

In a quiet corner of an ancient riverbed on Mars, a speckled rock has pushed the search for extraterrestrial life into its ...

Right now one of the most advanced planetary explorers ever built is scouring the surface of Mars. Supported by a team of hundreds of scientists back on Earth, the Perseverance rover has traveled ...

The race to Mars has quietly become the defining contest of twenty-first century spaceflight, pitting a state-backed Chinese ...

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 ...

While NASA's Mars Sample Return initiative is in political hot water, China is moving ahead on plotting out its rendezvous with the Red Planet. China's roadmap for a Mars Sample Return mission to be ...

NASA’s Mars rover finds organic signals in mudstone that resemble microbial activity, sparking new debate over life on the ...

See Rocket Lab's "proposed mission architecture" for a Mars sample return mission in this animation. Credit: Rocket Lab ...

NASA’s Perseverance rover continues collecting and studying Mars samples as uncertainty grows over the future of the Mars Sample Return program.

Bringing samples from Mars back to Earth is one of NASA's most ambitious goals. The plan goes back to the 1970s, with NASA's robotic exploration program, when the first spacecraft landed on the ...

A mudstone sample from Jezero Crater shows textures and minerals that on Earth often form through microbial activity. Scientists caution that nonbiological processes could also explain the features, ...