Andrew Finch’s Others Will Follow is about a mission to Mars gone awry, but this isn’t The Martian. There are no alien potatoes, and no jokes about space pirates—just a lonely astronaut reflecting on his fate, and deciding to risk it all to send one last inspirational message back to Earth.
The Odyssey orbiter has been hovering above Mars, photographing its surface and taking data for 16 years now. There’s seemingly infinite combinations of things to study and instruments to study them with—this time, all NASA had to do was turn the camera around.
Before the 68th International Aeronautical Congress early this morning, Elon Musk delivered some bold predictions for his aeronautics company SpaceX: a massive new rocket that could put a satellite ten times the size of Hubble into space, a base on the moon, and two manned missions to Mars by 2024 to find a water…
Billionaire whiz kid Elon Musk, who last year announced his plan to send a group of astronauts either incredibly brave or incredibly eager to get off this dumb planet to colonize Mars, is poised to give a big update on those plans on Friday.
Before Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other space enthusiasts can ship humans to Mars as easily as an Amazon Prime delivery, we need to figure out they’ll fare on a foreign planet. Luckily, NASA and the University of Hawaii have been all over this, funding several successful iterations of an experiment called Hawaii Space…
When you think about what makes a planet special, maybe you think about its size, its composition, how far it is from the Sun, and maybe how large its collection of apples is. You are probably not thinking about its density. But maybe you should be.
Over the past few days, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been making a steady climb towards a strange Martian ridge that’s captivated scientists since before the mission even started. Known as Vera Ridge after the pioneering astrophysicist Vera Rubin, the durable outcrop could shed new light on the environment and potential…
Last month, NASA’s Curiosity rover captured some of the most remarkable images of Martian clouds we’ve ever seen. Now rare, these Earth-like cirrus clouds are a glimpse into the Red Planet’s distant past.
Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are like the bay leaves of the solar system: they’re fine I guess but what are they trying to do? The larger satellite, Phobos, is interesting because its existence is almost poetic: it’s small, falling apart due to stress, and apparently, desperately in need of validation.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose prior plan for stellar colonization involved sending people who are not Elon Musk to go die on Mars, thinks this noble endeavor will require a practice round of sending people to die on the Moon first.
On Sunday, four Chinese volunteers were sealed into a 1,720-square-foot lab where they are supposed to remain for the next six and a half months. The experiment is one of the latest steps in China’s plan to put astronauts on the moon by 2036.
In Andy Weir’s novel-turned-Matt-Damon-movie The Martian, the protagonist endures the harsh terrain of Mars by using his own shit to grow potatoes. The idea isn’t that outlandish—over the last few years, a NASA-backed project has been attempting to simulate Martian potato farming by growing taters in the Peruvian…
You might know Alex Jones as the guy who peddles conspiracy theories about politics and pizza. Or you might know him as the guy who was successfully sued by yogurt. But it’s easy to forget that he also believes some rather interesting things about NASA, the moon, and alien life.
See that faint, blue dot in the middle of this NASA image? That’s the Curiosity rover making its way up the rocky slopes of Mount Sharp. The robotic lander, now approaching its fifth year of operation, has never looked so lonely.
You’re probably aware of some of the challenges of sending astronauts to space. Getting to space, that’s one for sure. But there’s another insidious effect you might not think of: Tissue damage from radiation.
Practically everyone who likes space and has lots of money is trying to get to Mars in the near future. But before anyone reaches the Red Planet, there are plenty of concerns to mull over, most notably that our bodies were not built to live in a barren litter box with a thin atmosphere. But the journey to Mars is an…
Our little red neighbor may be a rocky red wasteland now, but lots of people think it was once an ocean-covered world just like our own. After scientists found some evidence of flowing water back in 2015, folks started to take these claims even more seriously. Heck, maybe Mars even supported life.
Lots of people really want to go to Mars. Some of them want to live on that barren litter box forever, which sounds exciting, but would probably suck. The thing about a Martian colony is that people would have to be able to reproduce there in order to keep it going—and luckily for those hopeful pioneers, a team of…
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates’ grabbed the world’s attention when Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced a plan to establish a colony on Mars by 2117. Officials have been relatively mum about the details of the “Mars 2117 Project”—but today, a person helping to lead the…
As the Curiosity rover crawls its way across the Martian surface, it has to deal with a team of over 20 people to decide its every move. That makes riding in the car with an annoying navigator seem like a luxury.
