Curiosity tagged posts

Why is Mars barren and uninhabitable, while life has always thrived here on our relatively similar planet Earth?

A discovery made by a NASA rover has offered a clue for this mystery, new research said Wednesday, suggesting that while rivers once sporadically flowed on Mars, it was doomed to mostly be a desert planet.

Mars is thought to currently have all the necessary ingredients for life except for perhaps the most important one: liquid water.

However, the red surface is carved out by ancient rivers and lakes, showing that water once flowed on our nearest neighbor.

There are currently several rovers searching Mars for signs of life that could have existed back in those more habitable t...

Scientists aren’t entirely sure how life began on Earth, but one prevailing theory posits that persistent cycles of wet and dry conditions on land helped assemble the complex chemical building blocks necessary for microbial life. This is why a patchwork of well-preserved ancient mud cracks found by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is so exciting to the mission’s team.

A new paper in Nature details how the distinctive hexagonal pattern of these mud cracks offers the first evidence of wet-d...

Journey To Mars

Learn about our real Journey To Mars  and Asteroid as well.

The film “The Martian” takes the work NASA and others have done exploring Mars and extends it into fiction set in the 2030s, when NASA astronauts are regularly traveling to Mars and living on the surface. NASA has collaborated on this film with 20th Century Fox Entertainment, providing guidance on production design and technical consultants

So whats happening in real life? NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s. NASA will send a robotic mission to capture and redirect an asteroid to orbit the moon. Astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft will explore the asteroid in the 2020s, returning to Earth with samples...