Why flying a helicopter on Mars is a big deal

NASA conducted its first flight on another planet early Monday morning, a short hop for a small chopper named Ingenuity which demonstrated technology that could prove critical to the future of space exploration.

Waves in thin air with broad effects

Mars has a very thin atmosphere, with nearly one hundredth the density of ours on Earth, and gravity pulls with little more than one third of the strength we feel on our planet. As a result, dust storms can go global. For ...

Ice-squeezed aquifers might create marsquakes

As the Mars InSight lander begins listening to the interior of Mars, some scientists are already proposing that some marsquakes could be signals of groundwater beneath the frozen surface of the Red Planet.

Image: Mars dust devil detail

Mars may have a reputation for being a desolate world, but it is certainly not dead: its albeit thin atmosphere is still capable of whipping up a storm and, as this image reveals, send hundreds – maybe even thousands – ...

NASA's Mars helicopter completes flight tests

Since the Wright brothers first took to the skies of Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina, Dec. 17, 1903, first flights have been important milestones in the life of any vehicle designed for air travel. After all, it's one thing ...

The incredible challenge of landing heavy payloads on Mars

It's too bad Mars is such an interesting place, because it's actually one of the most difficult places to visit in the solar system, especially if you want to bring along a lot of luggage. That planet is a graveyard of missions ...

Plasma in a bag

Plastic bags coated by plasma at atmospheric pressure serve as a GMP laboratory for the cultivation of adherent cells. The plasma is used to modify the internal surface of the bag specifically, so that different cell types ...

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