Nasa, Planet | featured news

NASA's Curiosity rover results confirm that Mars has lost most of its atmosphere, on its way to becoming a cold, dry planet. In experimental results reported Monday at a European geoscience meeting in Vienna, Austria, a look at the Martian air by the $2.5 billion rover finds evidence that as much as 90% of the original atmosphere there has dissipated into space over the planet's lifetime. "It was still red, but it means that Mars once was a warmer, wetter world," says rover team scientist Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan. "It was also a more habitable world, essentially four billion years ago."

NASA's Curiosity rover has zapped its first Martian rock, aiming its laser for the sake of science. During the target practice on Sunday, Curiosity fired 30 pulses at a nearby rock over a 10-second window, burning a small hole.

NASA's rover carries a sophisticated weather station offering data on the Red Planet's environment that astronauts might one day encounter.

NASA's Curiosity rover has beamed back its first color photo from the ancient crater where it landed on Mars and a video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the Martian atmosphere, a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world.

After an 8 1/2-month voyage through space, NASA's souped-up Mars spacecraft zoomed toward the red planet for what the agency hopes will be an epic touchdown. The fiery punch through the tenuous Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph Sunday night marks the beginning of "seven minutes of terror" as the Curiosity rover aims for a bull's-eye landing inside a massive crater near the equator.