Mars News and Discussions

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Mars glaciers found to be over 80% pure ice, study shows

by Mikayla Mace Kelley, Planetary Science Institute

On the slopes of Martian mountains and craters clings what appears to be flowing honey, coated in dust and frozen in time. In reality, these features are incredibly slow-moving glaciers, and their contents were once thought to be mostly rock enveloped in some ice.

Work over the last 20 years has demonstrated that at least some of these glaciers are mostly pure ice with only a thin cover of rock and dust, but according to a new paper published in Icarus, glaciers all over the planet actually contain more than 80% water ice, a significant finding. Ultimately, this means that Mars's glacial ice deposits are nearly pure across the globe, providing a clearer understanding of Mars' climate history and a possible resource for future utilization.

The paper was led by Yuval Steinberg, a recent graduate of the Weizmann Institute of Science, based in Israel. The two co-authors, Oded Aharonson and Isaac Smith, are senior scientists at the Planetary Science Institute, based in Tucson, with faculty appointments at the Weizmann Institute of Science and York University, respectively.

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-mars-glac ... ously.html

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Why send one copter to Mars when you can send six?
By David Szondy
August 01, 2025

Hoping to push Mars exploration into top gear and do recon for a future crewed landing, AeroVironment has released its concept for a mission consisting of half a dozen autonomous helicopters that would land on the Red Planet under their own power.

When NASA sent its Ingenuity helicopter to Mars aboard the Perseverance rover in 2020, the engineers built better than they knew. A demonstrator designed to prove the feasibility of flying machines on Mars, it was only supposed to make five flights over the course of 31 (Earth) days. However, it turned out to be so overengineered that the little robotic copter flew 72 times over 1,004 days before it smashed its rotors in a bad landing.

Today, NASA is so impressed by the record of Ingenuity that it plans to include helicopters on future Mars landing missions and is even planning to send a chopper to Saturn's largest moon, Titan. They'd probably also send one to the Moon if it weren't for that pesky no atmosphere thing.

https://newatlas.com/space/aerovironmen ... s-copters/

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13 Years In, NASA Gives Curiosity a Firmware Update
The little Mars rover is still picking up all-new abilities that keep it rolling ever forward, even as its heart is dying.
By Graham Templeton August 6, 2025

You'd think NASA would have figured out Curiosity's complete feature set by now—after all, the rover has been rolling around the Martian surface for 13 years. But the space agency continues to find new ways of improving the rover and updating its software, opening up new possibilities. The updates also throw Curiosity a lifeline as its main power source continues to decay.

For the NASA engineers tasked with directing Curiosity around the Red Planet, energy is a core daily concern. There’s only so much electricity to go around, and virtually everything Curiosity does takes some of this precious resource. That even extends to heating the components to keep them within operating temperatures. Most especially, engineers have to keep a close watch on how much time Curiosity spends simply being active, versus asleep. In many cases, that comes down to ensuring the rover's tasks take less time.

https://www.extremetech.com/science/13- ... are-update

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[zzz]

So was it orange to the naked eye or not.

[firestar464]

No

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Humans aint going to mars within the next decade. But interesting none the less. Will be nice for space stations(private or public) around earth be you on the international space station or chinese one.

[caltrek]

Scientists Reveal What's Inside Mars: It's Chunky, With a History of Violence
By michele Starr
August 29, 2025

Introduction:

(Science Alert) The interior of Mars is as chunky as a delicious macadamia cookie.

A new analysis of the acoustic waves that ripple through and bounce around the red planet's guts reveals that the ancient, early crust of Mars is sequestered in its mantle. It takes the form of huge chunks of drifting rock, preserved geological fossils from the time of the planet's formation.

These chunks indicate a violent history that is startlingly similar to that suspected for Earth, involving a giant collision with a massive object while the planet was still young and forming.

Read more of the Science Alert article here: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientist ... -violence

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NASA Eyes $700 Million Mars Communication Satellite Ahead of Future Manned Missions
Despite a major drive to move to more of a service model for communic

NASA has announced plans to procure a new communications satellite that would orbit Mars and transmit data to and from the Red Planet. The proposed price tag is $700 million, representing close to 4% of the organization's budget for the next year. This is somewhat of a surprising move, as NASA has previously announced its intention to transition towards using private sector satellites on a service model for future communications platforms.

The budget reconciliation bill enacted in July spelled out this $700 million procurement plan, with the satellite designed to act as a relay for information to and from Mars. The bill doesn't offer concrete details on the orbiter, but says it must be completed by the end of 2028. That only stipulates manufacturing, though, giving no idea of when the satellite would launch, nor enter its intended Mars orbit.

https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/n ... ure-manned

[wjfox]

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Martian rock contains 'clearest sign' yet of ancient life on Mars, NASA says

Source: CNN

Scientists believe intriguing leopard spots on a rock sampled by the Perseverance rover on Mars last year may have potentially been made by ancient life, NASA announced Wednesday. The team has also published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature about the new analysis, though they say further study is needed. “After a year of review, they have come back and they said, listen, we can’t find another explanation,” said Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “So this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”

The sample, called Sapphire Canyon, was collected by the Perseverance rover from rocky outcrops on the edges of the Neretva Vallis river valley, a region sculpted by water that once flowed into Jezero Crater more than 3 billion years ago. The rover landed within the crater to explore the ancient lake site in February 2021, seeking rocks created or modified by water on Mars in the past. Perseverance drilled the Sapphire Canyon sample from an arrowhead-shaped rock called Cheyava Falls in July 2024.

Although the sample is safely ensconced in a tube millions of miles away on Mars, scientists have remained intrigued by the rock because of its potential to reveal whether microscopic life ever existed on Mars. “The discovery of a potential biosignature, or a feature or signature that could be consistent with biological processes, but that requires further work and study to confirm a biological origin is something that we’re sharing with you all today that grows from years of hard work, dedication and collaboration between over 1,000 scientists and engineers here at the (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory and our partner institutions around the country and internationally,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist at JPL, during a news conference Wednesday.

Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/10/scie ... ock-sample

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New Mars research reveals multiple episodes of habitability in Jezero Crater

by Rice University
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-mars-reve ... ility.html

New research using NASA's Perseverance rover has uncovered strong evidence that Mars' Jezero Crater experienced multiple episodes of fluid activity—each with conditions that could have supported life.

By analyzing high-resolution geochemical data from the rover, scientists have identified two dozen types of minerals, the building blocks of rocks, that help reveal a dynamic history of volcanic rocks that were altered during interactions with liquid water on Mars. The findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, provide important clues for the search for ancient life and help guide Perseverance's ongoing sampling campaign.

The study was led by Rice University graduate student Eleanor Moreland and employed the Mineral Identification by Stoichiometry (MIST) algorithm—a tool developed at Rice—to interpret data from Perseverance's Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL). PIXL bombards Martian rocks with X-rays to reveal their chemical composition, offering the most detailed geochemical measurements ever collected on another planet, according to the study.

[firestar464]

Tumbleweed rover tests demonstrate transformative technology for low-cost Mars exploration

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-tumblewee ... ation.html

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[firestar464]

(god the replies are insufferable)

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NASA confirms support for delayed European Mars rover: ESA

The rover, which is named after British scientist Rosalind Franklin, is planned to touch down on the Martian surface in 2030.

NASA has confirmed that it will contribute to Europe's Martian rover Rosalind Franklin, which is scheduled to launch in 2028 after repeated delays, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday.

The rover aims to be the first on the red planet capable of drilling up to two meters (6.5 feet) below the surface to search for extraterrestrial life.

However, the mission relies on several elements from NASA, which US President Donald Trump has targeted with steep budget cuts since returning to the White House in January.

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said he had received "a letter from the NASA administration to confirm the contributions" of the US space agency to the mission.

https://phys.org/news/2025-11-nasa-dela ... rover.html