Mars

The earliest fossil evidence of life on Earth has been found in rocks 3.7 billion years old in Greenland, raising chances of life on Mars aeons ago when both planets were similarly desolate, scientists said on Wednesday. The experts found tiny humps, between 1 and ...

An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age that is part of an ongoing cycle of climate change, scientists said on Thursday. The Martian ice began its retreat ...

In the coming decades, as humans leave Earth to expand the bounds of space travel, astronauts are sure to find themselves for the first time in habitats other than the International Space Station. Clearly NASA has this in mind, as it awarded a group of ...

Three years after landing in a giant Martian crater, NASA's Curiosity rover has found what scientists call proof that the basin had repeatedly filled with water, bolstering chances for life on Mars, a study published on Thursday showed. The research offered the most comprehensive picture ...

Earth's magnetic field has been a life preserver, protecting against relentless solar winds, streams of charged particles rushing from the sun, that otherwise could strip away the planet's atmosphere and water. "It would be a pretty barren planet without it," said University of Rochester geophysicist ...

Researchers said on Friday that long-term exposure to galactic cosmic rays, which permeate space, may cause dementia-like cognitive impairments in astronauts during any future round-trip Mars journey, expected to take at least 2½ years. In a NASA-funded study, mice exposed to highly energetic charged particles ...

Methane in the Martian atmosphere and organic chemicals in the red planet's soil are the latest tantalizing findings of NASA's Mars Curiosity rover as it hunts for clues about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, scientists said on Tuesday. NASA scientists said Curiosity found periodic bursts ...

Billions of years ago, a lake once filled the 96-mile- (154-km) wide crater being explored by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, bolstering evidence that the planet most like Earth in the solar system was suitable for microbial life, scientists said on Monday. The new findings combine ...

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has arrived at the base of a mountain of layered rock that scientists suspect holds clues about whether the planet most like Earth in the solar system had the ingredients to support and preserve signs of microbial life. The 1-ton rover ...

A NASA spacecraft designed to one day fly astronauts to Mars rolled out of its processing hangar at the U.S. space agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday to be prepared for a debut test flight in December. "This is a pretty historic moment ...