Phobos

From deep below the soil at Earth’s polar regions to Pluto’s frozen heart, ice exists all over the solar system...and beyond.

NASA's MarCO mission was designed to find out if briefcase-sized spacecraft could survive the journey to deep space. Now, MarCO has Mars in sight.

InSight, slated to land on Mars Nov. 26, 2018, will be the first mission to use a robotic arm to grasp instruments and release them into place on another planet.

Hundreds of scientists and Mars-exploration enthusiasts will convene just north of Los Angeles later this week to present, discuss and deliberate the future landing site for NASA's next Red Planet rover – Mars 2020.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, this week commanded the agency's Curiosity rover to switch to its second computer. The switch will enable engineers to do a detailed diagnosis of a technical issue that has prevented the rover's active computer from storing science and some key engineering data since Sept. 15.

Quite a few candles have been lit since NASA was born on Oct. 1, 1958. Here’s a quick look back at some highlights from six decades of exploration—and a glimpse of what’s ahead.

Evidence quietly materialized on the other side of the globe that the storm was growing and beginning to affect Gale Crater, the research site of NASA’s Curiosity rover. It came from an unexpected source: an actuator, or motor, that powers a lid to a funnel that takes in samples of powdered Martian rock dropped in by Curiosity’s drill.

NASA recently submitted to Congress a plan to revitalize and add direction to NASA’s enduring purpose.

NASA still hasn't heard from the Opportunity rover, but at least we can see it again. A new image produced by HiRISE, a high-resolution camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), shows a small object on the slopes of the Red Planet's Perseverance Valley. That object is Opportunity.

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft is celebrating four years in orbit studying the upper atmosphere of the Red Planet and how it interacts with the Sun and the solar wind. To mark the occasion, the team has released a selfie image of the spacecraft at Mars.

This summer, NASA has been flying the first two next-generation CubeSats to deep space. They're currently on their way to Mars, trailing thousands of miles behind the InSight spacecraft. InSight and its CubeSat tag-alongs are already more than halfway to the Red Planet.

Tools that can quickly reveal a terrain’s chemistry and form will help astronauts explore new worlds.

After snagging a new rock sample on Aug. 9, NASA's Curiosity rover surveyed its surroundings on Mars, producing a 360-degree panorama of its current location on Vera Rubin Ridge.

September nights! Planets bright! Milky Way sights!!

As the skies above Opportunity continue to clear, engineers at JPL are increasing the frequency of commands asking the solar-powered rover to communicate with Earth.

The mission's heat probe could reveal how the planet's towering volcanoes formed.

To most of us, dust is an annoyance. But these tiny particles that float about and settle on surfaces play an important role across the solar system.

A new paper published in Science this week suggests that liquid water may be sitting under a layer of ice at Mars' south pole.

The European Space Agency announced that radar data collected by its Mars Express spacecraft point to a pond of liquid water buried under layers of ice and dust in the south polar region of Mars.

Simulating alien worlds, designing spacecraft with origami and using tiny fossils to understand the lives of ancient organisms are all in a day’s work for NASA interns.

Scientists with NASA's Mars orbiters have been waiting years for an event like the current Mars global dust storm.

This summer offers plenty of opportunities for skywatchers looking to observe Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and meteors--with or without a telescope.

NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers were only supposed to rove around Mars for 90 days. Although NASA ended communications with the Spirit rover in 2011, Opportunity continued its mission and still operates today. Listen in with Steve Squyers from Cornell University as he recounts the amazing discoveries we’ve made about the Red Planet because of these two long-lived rovers.

A dust storm continues to envelop the Red Planet and Curiosity's labs are back in action.

What's Up for July? Mars is closest to Earth since 2003!