All posts tagged: Mars

NASA Ends Mars Mission 6 Months After Losing Communication With Spacecraft

NASA Ends Mars Mission 6 Months After Losing Communication With Spacecraft

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times, After more than a decade of service, unlocking treasure troves of insights into Mars’s atmosphere, NASA announced on June 3 that its MAVEN mission has come to an end after a still unknown anomaly threw the spacecraft off course and drained its battery. NASA’s MAVEN mission is observing the upper atmosphere of Mars to help understand climate change on the planet. MAVEN entered its science phase on Nov. 16, 2014. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Short for “Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution,” NASA’s MAVEN mission launched in November 2013 to study the Red Planet’s atmosphere, specifically how it interacts with solar flares and other types of space weather, as well as readings of the dust storms. The mission was supposed to last one year, but the hardware continued to operate for another decade, providing insights crucial to sending a human crew there with the right protection in the future. It was also able to give ground systems early warning of incoming coronal ejecta from the sun. “MAVEN …

Could it be aliens? From Cheyava Falls on Mars to exoplanet K2-18b – here’s what scientists really think

Could it be aliens? From Cheyava Falls on Mars to exoplanet K2-18b – here’s what scientists really think

Published by skeptic

It may seem like we are on the verge of discovering alien life. In 2025, a press release stated that we have the “strongest hints yet” of extraterrestrial life on the exoplanet K2-18b. And when talking about a collected sample from a rock named “Cheyava Falls” on Mars, Nasa Administrator Sean Duffy said this was the “closest we have ever come” to discovering life on the red planet. Such moments capture the imagination. But they also raise an important question: what do the majority of scientists actually think? Surprisingly, we usually don’t know. When a scientific controversy or breakthrough dominates headlines, press officers and journalists often quote a handful of experts. These views may be insightful, but they rarely tell us what the wider scientific community thinks. And yet public discussions frequently rely on phrases such as “the science says” or “scientists believe”, as if there were a clear and measurable answer. In reality, systematic evidence about scientific opinion is often missing. My colleagues and I recently tried to change that in the domain of …

NASA announces end of long-operating Mars probe’s mission

NASA announces end of long-operating Mars probe’s mission

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON, May 29 : NASA announced on Tuesday the end of the mission of its MAVEN spacecraft, which spent more than 11 years orbiting Mars to study the atmosphere of Earth’s planetary neighbor, after losing contact with the robotic probe six months ago. MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, was the U.S. space agency’s first mission devoted to observing the Martian atmosphere and its evolution. Launched in 2013, it began orbiting Mars in 2014 and exceeded its originally planned one-year mission by a decade. NASA officials told reporters on Wednesday that they last heard from MAVEN on December 6, when it experienced an unexpected loss of signal after passing behind Mars from Earth’s vantage point, and was later determined to be in “an unrecoverable state.” Mike Moreau, MAVEN project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said a NASA review board is working to determine what caused the failure. MAVEN was involved in relaying Mars science data from assets such as the robotic surface rovers Curiosity and Perseverance to Earth. Tiffany …

Researchers find evidence of Zwan-Wolf effect on Mars

Researchers find evidence of Zwan-Wolf effect on Mars

Published by skeptic

Using data from the NASA spacecraft MAVEN, a team at West Virginia University have found evidence of the atmosphere of planets being protected from solar winds, even without strong magnetic fields, also known as the Zwan-Wolf effect. The Zwan-Wolf effect was first described in 1976 and had only been observed in planetary magnetospheres, not in atmospheres. But findings reported in Nature Communications have observed the effect in Mars’ atmosphere, bringing new understanding to how our Sun interacts with planetary bodies in our solar system. The sun emits a continuous flow of plasma, known as solar wind. When this plasma flow encounters large objects like planets or comets, it is deflected around them, similar to the flow of water around a rock in a stream. “However,” said Christopher Fowler, planetary scientist at West Virginia University, “because the water in that stream is relatively dense, physical collisions between water molecules bumping into each other and the rock determine how the water is diverted. In contrast, the environment in space is so tenuous that solar wind particles do …

Mars’ atmosphere is changing how scientists see unmagnetized planets

Mars’ atmosphere is changing how scientists see unmagnetized planets

Published by Jenni Sidey

Mars does not have Earth’s kind of magnetic shield, so it has often been treated as the solar system’s more exposed world. It is a planet left to take the sun’s blows with far less protection. But during a violent solar storm in December 2023, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft caught Mars doing something scientists did not expect to see so clearly. Instead, it appeared to shove plasma aside inside its own atmosphere. The observations offer the first direct evidence that a process called the Zwan-Wolf effect can happen within the ionosphere of an unmagnetized planet. Until now, that effect had largely been associated with places such as Earth’s magnetosphere. This is where a strong internal magnetic field helps redirect the solar wind before it can plunge too deeply toward the planet. The new work, led by West Virginia University planetary scientist Christopher Fowler, shows that Mars can produce a similar response even without a global dipole magnetic field. Therefore, the finding broadens the picture of how space weather shapes worlds across the solar system, including Venus, …

One dead, 780 arrested across France as unrest mars PSG’s victory night

One dead, 780 arrested across France as unrest mars PSG’s victory night

Published by Sam Flores

French authorities announced Sunday that 780 people were arrested across the country when overnight celebrations of Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League victory over Arsenal were marred by violent clashes, and a road accident that killed a young man. Thousands of people poured into the streets of Paris for the match and to revel in PSG’s triumph in the final held in the Hungarian capital Budapest late Saturday. But some mobs clashed with police, around 22,000 of whom were deployed across France after unrest last year when PSG also won the competition. Read morePSG beat Arsenal on penalties to win back-to-back Champions League titles Highlighting an increased use of fireworks directed at law enforcement, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said in a press briefing that 57 security forces were injured and that there had been “219 participants injured in France, including eight seriously”. The Paris public prosecutor’s office announced the death of a young man in his twenties after he crashed head-on into concrete blocks on a Paris ring road exit ramp on his motocross bike. Another young …

New Mars rover could swim through sand like a desert lizard

New Mars rover could swim through sand like a desert lizard

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. To effectively travel on Mars, rovers need to deal with a lot of sand. German engineers have created a new kind of ground rover that uses swimming motions to push through sand that may otherwise cause the  wheels to get stuck. Its inspiration: the African sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard known for burrowing into the Sahara Desert and literally swimming through its sand like a fish. It’s one of the animal kingdom’s strangest methods of propulsion, but it may help shape the future of Mars exploration. A video of the rover, released this week by the University of Würzburg, shows a mini-fridge-sized, silver rover making its way through a sandy, Martian-mimicking test floor. Rather than rolling forward, each of its four wheels cuts through the sand in what looks like a figure-eight motion. The rover pushes on several yards and then cuts a corner and returns to where it started. Sandfish-inspired rover “The wheels mimic the animal’s [sandfish’s]characteristic interaction …

A Probe Took Incredible Pictures of Mars on Its Way to a Far-Off Asteroid

A Probe Took Incredible Pictures of Mars on Its Way to a Far-Off Asteroid

Published by skeptic

The Psyche probe, launched in October 2023 on its way to the metallic asteroid it studies, recently performed a flyby of Mars to take advantage of its gravitational pull and continue its trajectory toward the asteroid belt. During the maneuver, the spacecraft obtained new images of the red planet. Psyche passed within 4,609 kilometers, or 2,864 miles, of the Martian surface, and was boosted to a higher velocity after completing the gravity assist. On the approach, NASA activated onboard cameras, magnetometers, and gamma ray and neutron spectrometers to calibrate each instrument using the planet’s atmosphere and terrain. In recent images released by the space agency, the rugged Martian surface can be seen in detail, along with traces of the solar wind that, around craters and the south polar cap, is rich in water ice. “We’ve captured thousands of images of the approach to Mars and of the planet’s surface and atmosphere at close approach. This dataset provides unique and important opportunities for us to calibrate and characterize the performance of the cameras, as well as …

Mars astronauts may do laundry by blasting clothes with a plasma beam

Mars astronauts may do laundry by blasting clothes with a plasma beam

Published by skeptic

White shirt material being cleaned with cold plasma University of Alabama in Huntsville, Propulsion Research Center Astronauts in space can’t do laundry – but that may be about to change. And it could mean that those on longer-duration missions will be able to have more of the comforts of home on the surfaces of the moon or Mars. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts tend to wear the same clothes for days on end and then pack them up to be thrown back towards Earth where they burn up in the atmosphere. That’s all well and good for missions lasting a few weeks or even months, but it is not a viable solution for missions that last longer and that aren’t regularly resupplied from Earth. That’s where Gabe Xu at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Chelsi Cassilly at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama come in. They have developed a sort of “laundry gun” that can be used to blast fabrics with cold plasma, killing off the microbes that cause unpleasant …

This Week in History: From a Mafia murder to touchdown on Mars

This Week in History: From a Mafia murder to touchdown on Mars

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more This week sees a dramatic reshaping of the global order, marked by Mikhail Gorbachev’s radical Soviet reforms and the swift political rise of Boris Yeltsin. Meanwhile, the demand for justice takes centre stage across the globe – from the devastating assassination of anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone and the legislative aftermath of the Dunblane massacre, to the long-awaited capture of the “Butcher of Bosnia”. Rounding this week’s news, classified memos and financial audits expose long-held secrets, while Nasa’s Phoenix probe pushes the very boundaries of human discovery on the surface of Mars. 27 May 1988 – Gorbachev outlines historic political overhaul In a major departure from decades of strict state control, the Soviet Communist Party introduces a sweeping perestroika framework designed to restructure the nation’s …