Astronomy, Mars | featured news

Firing on all engines, NASA's latest rover to Mars executed a course adjustment Wednesday that put it on track for a landing in August.

A NASA rover scouting for signs of past water on Mars has found the strongest evidence yet -- a vein of gypsum, a mineral deposited by water, protruding from an ancient rock.

The one-ton, car-sized Curiosity rocketed from Kennedy Space Center Saturday. The vehicle is on a two-year mission to determine whether life could have existed on Mars.

As big as a car and as well-equipped as a laboratory, NASA's newest Mars rover blows away its predecessors in size and skill. Nicknamed Curiosity and scheduled for launch on Saturday, the rover has a 7-foot arm tipped with a jackhammer and a laser to break through the Martian red rock. What really makes it stand out: It can analyze rocks and soil with unprecedented accuracy. "This is a Mars scientist's dream machine," said NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Ashwin Vasavada, the deputy project scientist. Once on the red planet, Curiosity will be on the lookout for organic, carbon-containing compounds. While the rover can't actually detect the presence of living organisms, scientists hope to learn from the $2.5 billion, nuclear-powered mission whether Mars has - or ever had - what it takes to nurture microbial life.

Russian scientists were racing against the clock Wednesday to find a way to fire the engines of an unmanned probe destined to collect soil samples from a moon of Mars, after equipment failure shortly after launch left it stuck in Earth orbit....

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The end of a 520-day simulated space mission marks one more step in a succession of make-believe trips to Mars, leading up to the real thing.

The first rock a NASA rover looked at when it arrived at a crater on Mars was unlike any looked at on the planet before, scientists said... And the first rock it looked at has already opened a new chapter in the study of Mars, NASA scientists said Thursday. On a telephone news conference, mission scientists giddily described that rock: full of zinc and bromine, elements that, at least for rocks on Earth, would be suggestive of geology formed with heat and water.

Scientists have found Earth's oldest fossils in Australia and say their microscopic discovery is convincing evidence that cells and bacteria were able to thrive in an oxygen-free world more than 3.4 billion years ago.

NASA's surviving Mars rover Opportunity has reached the rim of a 14-mile-wide crater where the robot geologist will examine rocks older than any it has seen in its seven years on the surface of the red planet, scientists said Wednesday....

NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Saturday became the first probe ever to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.