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Perseverance

SPACE: There’s a Green Rock on Mars

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Green Rock on Mars - NASA

Perseverance’s laser hasn’t yet penetrated the mystery of a strange Martian rock near the rover’s new digs. NASA’s rover is waiting for its companion, the Ingenuity helicopter, to make the first-ever powered flight on another planet. Meanwhile, its instruments targeted a greenish-looking rock on the Red Planet’s surface that has the science team “trading lots of hypotheses,” according to the rover’s Twitter feed — but please don’t pick aliens as one of them. “Is it something weathered out of the local bedrock?,” a tweet the account posted on Wednesday (March 31) wondered. “Is it a piece of Mars plopped into … Read more

History Repeats Itself – Part of the Wright Brothers’ Plane to Fly on Mars

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Wright Brothers' Plane - pixabay

When NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars in February, it carried a bit of the Wright brothers’ first airplane with it. A swatch of fabric from the airplane, known as the Flyer, is secured beneath the solar panels of an experimental helicopter, which in turn is strapped to the underside of the rover, according to a statement from NASA. The helicopter, called Ingenuity, is attached to the rover for now, but soon, if all goes well, scientists will pilot the aircraft remotely over the surface of the Red Planet. This flight will be attempted “no earlier than April 8,” … Read more

SPACE: Watch Perseverance Land On mars

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Perseverance

For the first time ever, you can watch a rover landing on Mars. And it’s epic on many levels. Human beings have been dropping machines on Mars since the 1970s: landers that parachuted to the surface, rovers that were destroyed during landing, and later rovers that survived their landings inside giant, bouncing cushions of airbags. Now powerful skycranes lower NASA rovers to the surface. But in all that time, all those spectacular successes and failures have taken place out of sight on another world. That changed with Perseverance.  NASA outfitted the Perseverance rover and its landing vehicle, which arrived on … Read more

Another Mars Mission This Month – This One from NASA

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Mars Perseverance - NASA

NASA’s new Mars rover will launch toward the Red Planet this Thursday, July 30. The Mars Perseverance rover will explore the planet for ancient habitable environments and signs of fossilized microbial life at Mars’ Jezero crater, which was once a lake. The launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT, according to NASA. Pre-launch coverage will begin at 7:00 a.m. EDT. The launch window will stay open until about 9:50 a.m. EDT, with opportunities to launch every five minutes in that two-hour timeframe. The pre-launch and launch will be livestreamed on Live Science. Mars Perseverance is part of NASA’s Moon to … Read more