NASA's beleaguered Mars Sample Return program currently faces extreme costs of up to $11 billion and a timeline that could reach 2040. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

NASA announced Friday that it will award contracts to seven companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to study how to transport rock samples from Mars more cheaply back to Earth. The space agency ...

This photomontage shows tubes containing samples from Mars, as collected by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. The agency’s Mars Sample Return Program plans to bring these samples back to study them in ...

In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover extracted a rock core from the edge of Neretva Vallis, a river valley cut into the Martian surface by water rushing into the Jezero Crater billions of years ago ...

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been on the prowl within Jezero Crater following its touchdown in February 2021. That car-sized robot has been devotedly picking up select specimens from across the ...

NASA's interim administrator, Sean Duffy, was fired up on Wednesday when he joined a teleconference to talk about new scientific findings that concerned the potential for life to have once existed on ...

The potential “biosignature” isn’t direct evidence of life itself, but rather a leftover sign that textural features on the ...

On Aug. 9, 1976, the Soviet space program launched its last moon mission. Luna 24 was a robotic sample return mission and the third of its kind. It lifted off on a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur ...