'Very Unexpected': NASA Rover Zapped a Rock on Mars And Found a Gemstone Surprise

'Very Unexpected': NASA Rover Zapped a Rock on Mars And Found a Gemstone Surprise

When NASA's Perseverance rover used its laser to tease apart some pale rocks lying around in Jezero Crater in 2025, scientists did not expect anything out of the ordinary.

NASA proposed Mars in the 1980s and Europe once aimed for 2033; today NASA says its architecture is not a mission or manifest, which explains why no landing date is official

Human beings have been “about twenty years” from Mars for more than half a century. The dates change, the spacecraft change and the political language changes, but the landing remains just beyond the current programme. That does not mean a human mission is impossible. It means a destination, an architecture and an approved flight are three different things. NASA now makes that distinction unusually clear. Its Moon to Mars architecture describes …

MTI Partner Unleashed Robotics Wins NASA Support for Next-Gen Mars Drilling Technology

Unleashed Robotics, a Washington state-based company and Tier-1 partner of the Mars Technology Institute (MTI), established by the Mars Society to advance technologies needed for the human exploration and settlement of the Red Planet, has been selected by NASA for negotiation for a $225,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award. The six-month project will advance the company’s innovative robotic core-drilling technology for fut…