Touchdown! Perseverance lands successfully on Mars
By Mike Wall, Space.com YOU can exhale now: NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed safely on Mars. The car-sized Perseverance, the most advanced robot ever sent to the Red Planet, aced its “seven minutes of terror” touchdown this afternoon (Feb. 18), alighting gently on an ancient lakebed inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater […]
Read MoreHow Mars became the prize for a new space race — and why China is hellbent on winning it
By Steffi Paladini, Space.com This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Steffi Paladini, Reader in Economics & Global Security, Birmingham City University LOOKING at its achievements over the past decade, nobody would doubt China is aiming to win the new […]
Read MoreMars is now having its busiest two weeks in 47 years
Mars and Earth lined up neatly last summer, and three separate space agencies seized their opportunity. It’s a busy February for Mars, with three probes from three separate countries arriving at the Red Planet over the course of just nine days. But this Martian party didn’t happen by coincidence — it has to do with […]
Read MoreSpaceX to get humans to Mars in 2026
Elon Musk is still confident that 2026 will be the year that his space company SpaceX lands humans on Mars, where he hopes to build a human settlement. In a wide-ranging interview with the audio-only Clubhouse app on Sunday, Musk said it will take “five and a half years” before a crewed mission of SpaceX’s Starship rocket […]
Read MoreStar Wars tensions rise as rival Mars probes on collision course
The skies above Mars will witness some startling aeronautical displays in the next few days when three rival space robot probes reach the red planet after journeying for millions of miles across space. The United Arab Emirates’ probe Hope orbiter will arrive first, on Tuesday, (tomorrow) followed by China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft the next day. Finally, […]
Read MoreChina’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission on track
(Beijing) – China’s first fully homegrown Mars mission is on its way to the Red Planet. The Tianwen-1 mission launched atop a Long March 5 rocket from Hainan Island’s Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre will reach Mars later this month. Tianwen-1 consists of an orbiter and a lander/rover duo, a combination of craft that had never before […]
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