For thousands of years, humans looked at Mars and wondered what lay on its surface. Fifty years ago this week, we finally found out when NASA's Viking 1 became the first spacecraft ever to land on the Red Planet and transmit images from its surface. It was humanity's first view from the surface of another planet.

Viking 1 had been programmed to take its first image just 25 seconds after touchdown, according to NASA. It occurred at 7:53 a.m. EDT on July 20, 1976 — exactly seven years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It was supposed to coincide with the U.S. Bicentennial on July 4, 1976, but the landing was delayed by the search for a flat landing zone.

Although the spacecraft landed safely at Chryse Planitia, north of the equator, mission controllers still had to wait another 19 minutes for the radio signal confirming success to cross the 212 million miles (340 km) between Mars and Earth.

Forty minutes after touchdown, the confirming image began appearing on monitors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, slowly building line by line from left to right. Dr. Thomas Mutch, leader of the Viking lander imaging team, never forgot the moment.

"I studied the black screen, waiting for that narrow strip that will signal the first few lines of the first picture," he said. "Rocks and sand are visible and — finally at the far right — one of the spacecraft foot pads, a symbolic artifact that stamps our accomplishment with the sign of reality … Time and time again I repeat, 'It's incredible.'"

The image revealed a solid, slightly rocky surface, with dust and pebbles thrown up by the landing already settling back onto the spacecraft. Viking’s first color image came the next day, with a panorama following a few days later.

The Viking mission consisted of four spacecraft: two orbiters and two landers. Viking 1 was joined six weeks later on the surface by Viking 2, which landed in Utopia Planitia, also in the northern hemisphere. Meanwhile, the two orbiters mapped Mars and relayed data — including more than 52,000 orbital images and 4,500 photographs from the surface — back to Earth.

Viking transformed our understanding of Mars, but its most intriguing scientific result remains unresolved. The landers carried the first experiments designed to detect life directly in Martian soil. Although the mission's official conclusion was that no convincing evidence of life had been found, some scientists have continued to argue that one of the experiments produced a genuine biological signal; others argue that Viking’s experiments destroyed the very evidence of life that they sought to prove. Discoveries by later missions — including organic molecules detected by Curiosity and perchlorate salts found by Phoenix — have prompted some researchers to revisit the Viking data.

Viking 1 fell silent in 1982, two years after Viking 2, following a software error during an update. The intrepid spacecraft showed us the surface of another planet for the first time, but whether Viking 1 also found the first hints of life off-Earth remains one of planetary science's most enduring mysteries.

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Researchers have found a new puzzle piece in Mars' geological history that hints that the Red Planet may have once harbored life. New data from NASA's Perseverance rover indicates that mudstones in Jezero crater contain a complex form of carbon, the chemical foundation of all known life. It's the highest concentration of organic molecules found on Mars to date.

Although the mere presence of carbon isn't proof that life once evolved on Mars, the location of the discovery adds to the excitement. This "macromolecular carbon" was discovered near other potential signs of life, or biosignatures, touted by NASA with great fanfare in 2025. This geological context adds credence to the case that microbes may have once colonized the Martian surface. The results were published Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Science Advances.

Perseverance landed in Jezero crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Since then, the site has emerged as one of the most geologically interesting places on Mars. "Jezero crater was once fed water and sediment from rivers, and, billions of years ago, it hosted a lake," Ashley Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.

It may have hosted more than that. A study published last year in the journal Nature found that some of the stones in an area of Jezero known as the Bright Angel outcropping contain clays and other minerals that are known to preserve fossils on Earth. One sample, in particular, raised eyebrows: a piece of a rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls, whose patterns resemble those left by terrestrial microbes. Although these patterns could have been created by nonliving sources, NASA officials proclaimed it one of the clearest signs yet of past microbial life on the Red Planet.

The backbone of life

The new research builds on this work by confirming the widespread presence of complex carbon molecules in and around the Bright Angel outcrop. In the study, the researchers used the rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument to map the carbon distribution in these rocks and sediments. They compared them with carbon data from NASA's Curiosity rover taken at Gale crater some 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, a distribution that suggests water may have been widespread on Mars in the deep past.

Murphy's team also determined that the carbon was not too weathered, indicating that it may have been exposed recently. However, it’s impossible to say whether the newly discovered carbon is related to life or not.

The work is an important step in unraveling Mars' geological history, including the planet's potential habitability and how water shaped its surface. But Murphy cautioned that it is far from a definitive answer.

"Macromolecular carbon on Mars does not prove the existence of life there," Murphy said. The molecules could indicate the presence of fossilized microbes, but they also could have formed through nonbiological means, like meteor strikes or running water.

Until scientists get their hands on a sample directly, it will be hard to tell exactly how this complex carbon arose and whether it represents a true biosignature. But that research may now be decades away — if it happens at all.

The Cheyava Falls sample was originally supposed to be brought to Earth in the 2030s as part of NASA and the European Space Agency's joint Mars Sample Return program. However, in its 2026 budget proposal, the Trump administration deemed the mission "financially unsustainable" and proposed slashing the project. Currently, the project is considered dead.

It may be China that gets the first shot at bringing Martian samples back to Earth for analysis. The country's Tianwen-3 sample-return mission will aim to collect several samples — albeit in a more accessible but less-promising site than where Perseverance has looked for biosignatures — in a mission due to launch no sooner than 2028.

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After 11 years studying Mars from above, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is officially dead, the agency announced in a statement on Wednesday (June 3). The culprit: a drained battery, triggered by an as-yet-unknown anomaly.

MAVEN (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) began orbiting Mars on Sept. 21, 2014, on a mission to study the Red Planet's mysterious atmosphere. Circling Mars roughly 6.6 times every Earth day, the spacecraft has facilitated countless discoveries over the last decade — including the first direct observations of a multi-million-year process that has been steadily stripping Mars of its atmosphere.

But on Dec. 6, 2025, NASA unexpectedly lost contact with the probe when it swung behind Mars during a regular orbit. At the time of the probe's expected reemergence, NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) could not detect a signal from MAVEN. (DSN is an international array of radio antennas that connects Earth with various spacecraft).

The agency convened an anomaly review board in February to assess the probe's status. Now, the team has shared their findings: The spacecraft is not recoverable, and its mission is officially at an end.

The precise cause of MAVEN's death remains unknown, and NASA will continue its assessment over the coming months. However, the board did share some preliminary details. A "brief fragment of telemetry data" obtained by the DSN indicated that MAVEN was rotating at an unusually high rate when it reemerged from behind Mars in December, indicating a change in its orbital trajectory.

"The review board concluded that due to this rotation, the batteries on the spacecraft had drained, causing the communications system to lose power and rendering MAVEN in an unrecoverable state," NASA officials wrote in the statement.

NASA hosted a public media teleconference to discuss the anomaly, as well as highlights of MAVEN's mission, on June 3 at 2 p.m. EDT.

In the teleconference, MAVEN's principal investigator Shannon Curry praised the spacecraft as "the best observer of atmospheric escape anywhere in the solar system." She said the MAVEN team likened the mission's sudden end to the "loss of a loved one."

MAVEN's discoveries

Even with MAVEN officially offline, data collected by the spacecraft will continue to inform scientific discoveries for years to come. Earlier this month, researchers used MAVEN data to identify a previously unknown phenomenon in Mars' atmosphere, hinting that its thin magnetic shield defends the planet against solar radiation more than previously thought.

MAVEN has also revealed the first direct evidence of "sputtering" — a process by which solar wind collides with Mars' upper atmosphere and flings particles into space, gradually eroding the Red Planet's atmosphere. This could explain why Mars became a dry, ostensibly dead planet while Earth has flourished.

The spacecraft also detected several types of auroras on Mars, and showed that Mars' magnetosphere can balloon outward by thousands of miles when solar wind calms down. All of these discoveries paint a more detailed and complex picture of how Mars' atmosphere and magnetic shield interact with solar radiation — which will be crucial to understand before sending human astronauts to the Red Planet.

Editor's note: This article was updated on June 3 at 4:10 p.m. to include comments from the NASA teleconference.

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A phenomenon that was thought to be impossible on Mars is squeezing the Red Planet's atmosphere like toothpaste from a tube, a new study finds. The surprising discovery, uncovered by a NASA spacecraft during a powerful solar storm, could change how we think of dangerous space weather throughout the solar system, researchers say.

The unlikely phenomenon, dubbed the Zwan-Wolf effect, was first discovered on Earth in 1976 and occurs when "charged particles are squeezed like toothpaste coming out of a tube along magnetic structures called flux tubes," NASA representatives wrote in a statement. These flux tubes are located within Earth's magnetosphere, the invisible field that is generated by the movements of our planet's molten metal core and shields us from radiation.

While similar phenomena likely occur on Jupiter and Saturn, experts have long assumed that the Zwan-Wolf effect could not happen on Mars because our next-door neighbor's core has long since solidified and, therefore, does not generate a proper magnetosphere. (This is also why the Red Planet has such a thin and wispy atmosphere; without magnetic shielding, most of its gases have been stripped away by solar storms.)

But in the new study, published May 18 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed data from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2014 (though NASA lost contact with it last year), and found something strange.

In December 2023, a powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) erupted from the sun and slammed into Mars, temporarily scrambling the remnants of its upper atmosphere and revealing disturbances that could be explained only by the Zwan-Wolf effect.

"When investigating the data, I all of a sudden noticed some very interesting wiggles," study lead author Christopher Fowler, a planetary scientist at West Virginia University, said in the statement. "I would never have guessed it would be this effect," he added.

Unlike on Earth, where the Zwan-Wolf effect occurs tens of thousands of miles above our planet's surface, the Martian equivalent occurs in the ionosphere — the upper part of the atmosphere, which is full of ionized gas, or plasma — at an altitude of around 125 miles (200 kilometers).

"No one expected that this effect could even occur in the atmosphere," Fowler said. "That's what makes this even more exciting."

Mars' Zwan-Wolf effect is likely powered by a localized magnetic field at the boundary where solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles that shoots from the sun — collides with ionospheric plasma, the researchers wrote. This means it is probably happening all the time, but we only realized it now because the radiation from the CME exaggerated the effect.

As a result, experts are keen to study this phenomenon further to better understand how it may impact future missions to Mars, since changes to the ionosphere will likely affect orbiting spacecraft, communications equipment, and the levels of harmful radiation that reach the planet's surface.

"Knowing how space weather interacts with Mars is essential," study co-author Shannon Curry, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and the principal investigator for MAVEN, said in the statement. It is, therefore, vitally important to understand "these links between our host star and the Red Planet," she added.

Now that we know the Zwan-Wolf effect can occur within planetary atmospheres, we may also soon discover it on other solar system worlds, such as Venus and Saturn's largest moon, Titan, the researchers hypothesized.

Is it just us, or is the Red Planet looking a lot bluer than usual?

NASA's Psyche spacecraft returned this colorful snapshot of Mars after completing a close flyby of the planet last week, marking a major milestone in the probe's long journey to the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche. The spacecraft passed within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the Martian surface on May 15, taking a suite of color images, including this close-up of the double-ringed Huygens crater and the heavily cratered southern highlands surrounding it.

Aside from the image of Huygens crater, Psyche obtained close-ups of wind blowing over craters in the Syrtis Major region and a high-resolution view of the water-ice-rich south polar cap of Mars.

In other spectacular images taken as Psyche approached and departed the planet, Mars appears as a thin crescent — a rare perspective afforded by Psyche's high angle of approach. Researchers also observed sunlight scattering through Mars' dusty atmosphere, creating a brighter-than-expected glow around the edge of the planet. As it left the vicinity of the Red Planet, Psyche got an image of an almost fully lit Mars, which included its south polar cap and the Valles Marineris canyon.

"We've captured thousands of images of the approach to Mars and of the planet's surface and atmosphere," Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead and a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, said in a NASA statement. It was part of an effort to calibrate Psyche's multispectral cameras well in advance of its arrival at asteroid 16 Psyche. "As the spacecraft continues its journey after the flyby, we'll continue calibration imaging of Mars for the rest of the month as it recedes into the distance," Bell added.

NASA's solar-powered Psyche mission launched Oct. 13, 2023, on a complex route to the asteroid belt. The quickest way to get somewhere in the solar system isn't to use propellant to fly directly but to slingshot around a moon or planet, effectively using gravity and orbital motion to accelerate a spacecraft. 16 Psyche is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where it orbits the sun about three times farther away than Earth does.

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the recent Martian flyby increased Psyche's speed by approximately 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h) and shifted its orbital plane by about 1 degree relative to the sun.

Following the maneuver, NASA engineers used the agency's Deep Space Network to confirm that the spacecraft remains on the correct trajectory for its scheduled arrival at asteroid Psyche in August 2029, where it will go into orbit and conduct detailed mapping and scientific observations. The asteroid is thought to be the exposed core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.

The abundant metals on the asteroid are thought to be worth many quadrillions of dollars — though, at the moment, there is no feasible plan for extracting them.

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The scientists operating NASA's Curiosity rover are breathing a sigh of relief after successfully removing a troublesome rock that got stuck on the end of the Mars rover's robotic arm for nearly a week. Video footage shows the robot "struggling" to shake off its pesky passenger by tilting, rotating and vibrating its metallic limb.

The first-of-its-kind fiasco began when Curiosity came across a fairly innocuous-looking rock, dubbed Atacama (after the Chilean desert on Earth), while exploring the slopes of Mount Sharp, which stands at the heart of Gale crater, near the Red Planet's equator. The rock was around 1.5 feet (46 centimeters) in diameter, 6 inches (15 cm) thick and approximately 28.6 pounds (13 kilograms), making it an ideal candidate for further analysis.

On April 25, Curiosity attempted to drill into Atacama to extract a sample that might be analyzed within its onboard "wet chemistry" laboratory. Although the robot's drill arm successfully bored into the rock, it quickly became clear that something had gone wrong.

"When the rover retracted its arm, the entire rock lifted out of the ground, suspended by the fixed sleeve that surrounds the rotating drill bit," NASA representatives wrote in a statement. "Drilling has fractured or separated the upper layers of rocks in the past, but a rock has never remained attached to the drill sleeve."

This posed an entirely new problem to the scientists controlling Curiosity, who "went to work to develop a plan to extract the drill bit from the rock," Bill Farrand, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who worked on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, wrote in a NASA blog post. But this ended up being something of a "struggle," he wrote.

The Curiosity team initially tried to remove Atacama by "vibrating the drill to shake off the rock," but they were unsuccessful. On April 29, they tried to vibrate the drill while reorienting the arm. However, this only managed to shake tiny, sand-like fragments off the rock.

Finally, on May 1, the rock dislodged after the team attempted "tilting the drill more," as well as rotating, vibrating and spinning the drill bit. They had planned to do this multiple times. However, the rock separated at the first attempt and fell back to the Martian surface, Farrand wrote.

Images show that Atacama fractured into at least two pieces upon impacting the ground.

Unfortunately, the sample, or drill tailings, were "lost from Atacama as part of the effort to dislodge the drill bit from the rock," Farrand wrote. The Curiosity team is, therefore, "seeking a more firmly rooted drill target in order to collect drill tailings for analysis," he added.

A busy few months

Curiosity has been through a lot since it first landed on Mars in 2012, but the past few months have been particularly eventful for the wandering robot.

In late April, researchers revealed that the rover had collected seven organic molecules at once — the largest single haul on Mars to date — to go along with a "giant string" of hydrocarbons discovered in February. (Both of these findings offer clues about the potential for ancient alien life on the Red Planet.)

A few weeks earlier, in early April, Curiosity also snapped photos of dozens of what look like "dragon scales" scattered across the ground. And in March, the robot found ruby-like crystals hidden within rocks similar to Atacama.

Prior to these findings, the rover had spent more than six months closely studying a series of ridge-like features, dubbed boxwork, which look like giant rocky spiderwebs zigzagging across the Red Planet's surface, and, most recently, discovered that they are covered in tiny, egg-like structures.

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Astronauts could complete a round trip to Mars in less than a year someday, potentially cutting current mission timelines in half, according to a new study that drew inspiration from asteroid trajectories.

Under current mission profiles, reaching Mars, which is located about 50% farther from the sun than Earth is, takes roughly seven to 10 months. Because Earth and Mars align for fuel-efficient transfers only every 26 months, astronauts must wait for a return window, stretching a full round trip to nearly three years.

However, the new findings, published online in the journal Acta Astronautica in April, suggest that early, imprecise orbital estimates of near-Earth asteroids — which were historically used to assess impact risks, before being discarded in favor of more precise data — may contain valuable geometric clues for designing faster interplanetary routes.

"Maybe this can change the idea that we need more than two years to go to Mars and return," study author Marcelo de Oliveira Souza, a cosmologist at the State University of Northern Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, told Live Science.

"I was not looking for this"

Souza first stumbled on the idea in 2015, when he was studying near-Earth asteroids. One object in particular, 2001 CA21, caught his attention because early estimates suggested it followed a rare path crossing both Earth's and Mars' orbital zones.

Although later measurements refined the asteroid's true trajectory, its initial geometry during the October 2020 opposition — when Earth and Mars were aligned on the same side of the sun, and closest together in their orbits — hinted at the possibility of "ultra-short" routes between the two planets, Souza noted in the paper.

"This was a surprise for me — I was not looking for this," he told Live Science.

As more observations allow astronomers to refine an asteroid's orbit, those early trajectories change, so someone analyzing it later wouldn't have seen the same path, Souza added. "Maybe I was in the right place at the right time," he said.

Round trip to Mars?

For the October 2020 opposition, Souza's calculations showed that a very fast, roughly 34-day trip from Earth to Mars is geometrically possible if a spacecraft follows a path similar to the asteroid's early orbital plane.

However, such a trajectory would require departure speeds of around 32.5 kilometers per second, well beyond current rocket capabilities, and a spacecraft would arrive at Mars traveling around 64,800 mph (108,000 km/h) — too fast for existing landing systems to handle safely, Souza noted in the paper.

Instead, Souza used the asteroid-inspired geometry to explore possible trips during future Mars oppositions in 2027, 2029 and 2031. By using a standard method for calculating paths between two points in space (called the Lambert analysis) and constraining those paths to remain within about 5 degrees of the asteroid's orbital tilt, Souza found that only the 2031 alignment offered a viable opportunity for rapid travel using near-term technology.

In that window, a round-trip mission from Earth to Mars could be completed in just 153 days, or roughly five months, according to the study.

In that scenario, a spacecraft would depart Earth on April 20, 2031, at about 27 kilometers per second, arrive at Mars by May 23 after a 33-day journey, spend about 30 days on the surface, depart June 22 and return to Earth by Sept. 20, with the return leg taking roughly 90 days.

Souza also identified a lower-energy alternative within the same window, requiring a launch at about 16.5 kilometers per second for a mission lasting about 226 days, or about 7.5 months ‪—‬ still significantly shorter than current mission timelines.

Still, the concept remains largely theoretical and would depend heavily on mission specifics — including spacecraft design, payload mass and propulsion capabilities — all of which would shape whether such fast transfers are feasible in practice.

The method, however, could still prove useful as a way to narrow the search for viable trajectories. The required velocities are comparable to those achieved by missions such as New Horizons — the NASA probe, which, when launched in 2006 on a mission to flyby Pluto at 16.26 kilometers per second, was the fastest human-made object ever launched from Earth.

Such high-speed trajectories could be within the reach of next-generation rockets such as SpaceX's Starship or Blue Origin's New Glenn, Souza told Live Science.

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A rock discovered by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover contains "the most diverse collection" of the building blocks of life ever seen on the Red Planet, including seven never found there before, new research confirms.

In 2020, Curiosity discovered and drilled into the rock, which has now been confirmed to contain organic molecules that bear the life-friendly element carbon. While scientists can't yet prove if the molecules formed due to biological or geologic processes, their findings add new evidence to the theory that ancient Mars was hospitable to life.

"Their discovery renewed confirmation that ancient Mars had the right chemistry to support life," officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission, wrote of the organics. "What's more, the molecules join a growing list of compounds known to be preserved in rocks even after billions of years of exposure on Mars to radiation, which can break down these molecules over time."

By the Martian seashore

The new analysis, published April 21 in the journal Nature Communications, shows that the rock sample included 21 carbon-containing molecules, including seven never seen before on the Red Planet. The newly found molecules included nitrogen heterocycle (a predecessor to RNA and DNA) as well as benzothiophene, which may have been key to bringing life-friendly chemistry to solar system planets aboard meteorites, the authors wrote.

The sample was nicknamed "Mary Anning 3," after the English paleontologist famous for discovering the first fossil ichthyosaur and plesiosaur. Much like the aquatic fossil environments Anning sought out, the Martian organics were found in an area of Mars that was teeming with lakes and streams before the planet dried out billions of years ago.

"This oasis surged and dried up multiple times in the planet's ancient past, eventually enriching the area with clay minerals, which are especially good at preserving organic compounds," JPL officials wrote.

Drilling for life

Last year, Curiosity also found the largest-ever organic molecules on Mars. These were "long-chain" hydrocarbons, including decane, undecane and dodecane.

These organic finds in 2020 and 2025 used an instrument on Curiosity called Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM). Curiosity first drills rocks using its robotic arm. Then, it turns the rocks into powder samples and lets the powder fall into SAM. The instrument contains a high-temperature oven that heats up the powder, allowing the compositions of the gases inside the rover to be measured.

SAM also contains small cups of solvent that can perform "wet chemistry." The Mary Anning 3 sample was the first to use tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) — a substance that breaks apart organic molecules, of which Curiosity only carries two cups — because the sample was considered of the highest value.

Curiosity's findings were verified on Earth using a space rock that's well known to science, the Murchison meteorite, which is 4 billion years old and includes organic molecules.

"A Murchison sample exposed to TMAH was found to break much larger molecules into some of the ones seen in Mary Anning 3, including benzothiophene," JPL officials wrote. "That result verifies that the Martian molecules found in Mary Anning 3 could have been generated from the breakdown of even more complex compounds relevant to life."

Curiosity, which has been on Mars since 2012, recently used its last TMAH cup on "weblike boxwork ridges, which were formed by ancient groundwater," according to JPL. The results will be written up in a future study.

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A section of Mars is covered in a surprising number of features that look like clumps of giant, fossilized reptile scales, new photos reveal. But don't be alarmed ‪—‬ the strange structures did not originate from monstrous aliens. Instead, they may have ties to ancient water.

NASA's Curiosity rover snapped the photos of the peculiar rocks as it was driving toward Antofagasta — a relatively young, 33-foot-wide (10 meters) impact crater located on the slopes of Mount Sharp (also called Aeolis Mons), which stands in the larger Gale crater, near Mars' equator.

A pair of black-and-white photos of the "scales" was released by NASA April 14, while a close-up color image of the rocks was shared online the next day by Kevin M. Gill, a software and spaceflight engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who specializes in image processing. (The pics were captured April 7 and April 13, respectively — also called Sol 4859 and Sol 4865 in Martian time.)

The unusual shape and tight clustering of these rocks have drawn comparisons to the scales of reptiles such as crocodilians, while some commenters joked that the formations look dragon-like.

It is currently unclear how many of the scale-like rocks were photographed or how large they are, but they stretched across the ground "for meters and meters," according to an April 10 NASA blog post.

Although the researchers were not shocked to see these multifaced rocks, or "polygons," they were surprised by the sheer quantity of them in the area.

"Many of the rocks we've driven over have these incredible textures — thousands of honeycomb-shaped polygons crisscross their surface," Abigail Fraeman, a planetary scientist at JPL, wrote in the blog post. "We've seen polygon-patterned rocks like these before, but they didn't seem quite this dramatically abundant."

Polygons with a similar honeycomb-like shape have been seen before on Mars on both smaller and larger scales. In these past instances, the shapes were often tied to the drying of wet mud or ice crystals moving beneath the Martian surface. However, it is too early for scientists to tell exactly how the latest shapes formed.

Curiosity has collected "lots of images and chemical data that will help us distinguish between different hypotheses for how the honeycomb textures formed," Fraeman said.

Animal impostors

Before reaching Antofagasta, Curiosity spent the better part of a year studying a series of rocky ridges on Mount Sharp dubbed "boxwork." These features are also known as Martian "spiderwebs" because of how they zigzag across the ground, and the wandering robot recently spotted tiny, egg-like spheroids stuck to their sides. (The "webs" should not be confused with the infamous "Spiders on Mars," which are dark, arachnid-like features that litter the planet's surface.)

Since landing on the Red Planet in 2012, the rover has also snapped a series of other objects that look suspiciously animal-like, including a surprisingly realistic coral-like rock formation.

NASA's other Mars rover, Perseverance, has also seen its fair share of faux creatures since touching down in 2021, including a statuesque "turtle" poking its head out of a shell. And the fleet of spacecraft orbiting Mars has spied other unusual entities, including a "butterfly" crater and a Martian "dog" buried beneath the planet's north pole.

Most of these animal associations are the result of a phenomenon known as pareidolia, which is when the human brain sees or hears something significant in a random image or pattern.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

A massive dark patch lurking within a giant Martian crater has been creeping across the Red Planet's surface since the feature was first spotted 50 years ago, new photos reveal — and scientists are unsure exactly why this is happening.

The shadowy structure is a patch of ground covered with ash and volcanic rocks, such as olivine and pyroxene, from ancient eruptions that occurred millions of years ago, before Mars was considered geologically dead. It is located in Utopia Planitia, a roughly 2,000-mile-wide (3,300 kilometers) plain in Mars' northern hemisphere.

NASA's Viking probes first photographed the blackened ground in 1976, shortly after arriving at the Red Planet. Since then, several photos have shown that this feature is expanding across the surrounding landscape; these include new images from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, which were captured in 2024 and released April 15.

It is unclear how large the shadowy feature is. However, sections of the patch's southern boundary have moved farther south by at least 200 miles (320 km), based on the latest photos from ESA. This suggests the dark terrain has been expanding by around 4 miles (6.5 km) per year.

Scientists are confident that the movement of the dark patch has something to do with Martian winds, which are known to scour the surface and kick up ash and dust.

"The spread of the ash over the last 50 years has two possible explanations: either it has been picked up and moved about by Martian winds, or the ochre dust that previously covered the dark ash has been blown away," ESA representatives wrote in a statement.

However, there is currently no clue as to which hypothesis is correct, they added.

Utopia Planitia

This region of Mars has been of great interest to scientists over the past half century. In 1976, the Viking 2 lander touched down in Utopia Planitia and carried out a series of "biological experiments" until its demise in 1980.

More recently, China's Zhurong rover also touched down there in 2021 and explored the giant plain before going dark in 2023. Chinese scientists have since used the Zhurong data to show that Utopia Planitia was most likely once covered with one of Mars' largest oceans, and they have even mapped out what they think was once a shoreline. The rover also may have detected clues of a surprising "climatic shift" in the region around 400,000 years ago.

Utopia Planitia is home to several large cracks in the ground, known as grabens, which are one of Mars' most unusual features and could also help provide clues to any tectonic activity that once rocked the Red Planet, according to ESA.

In addition, researchers think there is a significant amount of buried ice beneath the region, which could have big implications for the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Mars is hiding a clutch of ruby-like crystals in its rocks, observations from the Perseverance rover suggest, and astronomers say other precious minerals, like sapphires, could exist across the Red Planet, too.

An international team of researchers presented the findings, based on observations from spring 2025, March 16 at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. These findings are currently under peer review and will appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The story begins a short time ago on a planet not too far away, when a roving robot the size of a compact car climbed the side of a 4 billion-year-old impact crater and began exploring its rim. On that ancient and stony rim, NASA's Perseverance rover found a curious scattering of pale-colored "float rocks" — out-of-place rocks that must have been transported there by impacts, geological activity or hydrological processes.

As scientists often do when faced with a curious specimen, they blasted it with a laser — specifically, the green laser from the Perseverance rover's SuperCam, situated atop its mast. This laser excites minerals, causing them to emit light at specific wavelengths. And because every element and compound emits certain wavelengths of light, this reveals a sample's chemical composition.

The corundum conundrum

The analysis showed that three of the laser-blasted float rocks exhibited clear signatures of the mineral corundum, with inclusions of the element chromium — crystals that match the chemical description of rubies. However, because the crystals are too small to be seen by Perseverance's imager, and their exact chemical composition is uncertain, the researchers aren't sure whether they have truly found Martian rubies or perhaps some other type of corundum.

"The different types of corundum are based on the chemistry," study co-author Valerie Payré, a planetary geologist at the University of Iowa, told Live Science via email. "Although corundum is Al2O3, there are minor elements like chromium, titanium, and iron that can be present."

"These elements will provide the color to the mineral, and the name of it," Payré added. "We cannot quantify the amount of chromium, and other elements like iron and titanium might be present too. It is thus difficult to conclude whether they are rubies or other types of corundum [like sapphires]."

The team ultimately classified the crystals as corundum and declined to guess about the variety without more chemical evidence.

Corundum is a mineral made of aluminum and oxygen. It is one of the hardest known natural substances, approaching the toughness of diamonds. Pure corundum is colorless, but microscopic impurities imbue it with brilliant hues. Iron or titanium inclusions yield brilliant blue sapphires, while chromium produces even rarer, resplendent rubies.

However, anyone holding out hope for a future Martian-gemstone-studded necklace may be disappointed. The corundum crystals found within the float rocks are tiny —‬ less than 0.2 millimeters (0.008 inches) in diameter.

Could slightly larger Martian rubies exist? "Yes, possibly," study co-author Olivier Beyssac, a senior scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Live Science via email. "Anyway corundum is pretty rare on Earth and rarely present as big crystals so one could expect the same on Mars."

Cosmic impacts?

It's also likely that the crystals formed under different conditions than those on our planet. On Earth, corundum is created through metamorphic and igneous processes, in which intense heat and pressure, facilitated by tectonic activity, transform existing rocks into potential gemstones.

But because there is no conclusive evidence for plate tectonics on Mars, the researchers suggest that the ruby-like crystals on the Red Planet may have formed through cosmic impacts.

"The impacts provide high temperatures and high pressures, which can produce corundum. Hydrothermal fluids are also generated," Payré explained. Yet the researchers must find additional samples, at their origin, to describe their formation mechanism.

"As of now, the corundum crystals were found in small pebbles that are coming from elsewhere, i.e., they are out of context. It is therefore difficult to constrain the full story," Payré said.

Rubies are far from the only spectacular stones found at Jezero crater, and further research may reveal sapphire-like stones there as well. In the past, scientists also discovered signs of other potential gemstones elsewhere on Mars, including quartz and opal — suggesting that our red planetary neighbor is a gem laboratory.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Scientists know that Mars spins a little faster each year, but the cause has been a mystery. Now, a new study published Feb. 18 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets suggests the reason may lie deep underground, where a huge plume of buoyant rock could be stirring beneath the Red Planet's crust.

This strange plume could help to explain not just Mars' quicker rotation but also how the planet holds on to geologic heat far longer than expected — forcing scientists to rethink how small, rocky worlds cool and die.

"The Martian surface is so old and shows all these complex but largely not well understood process[es], which I think we can start to unravel by combining interior with surface," Bart Root, an assistant professor of planetary exploration at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and first author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "Understanding Mars will help in understanding our solar system, as its history is laid out on the red soil."

Looking under the surface

Mars has some of the largest volcanoes and mountains in the solar system. This is because, unlike Earth, Mars does not seem to have plate tectonics, the shifting crustal plates that drive much of our planet's volcanic activity. Instead, the lava from Mars' ancient active volcanoes just sits there, piling up and building far bigger structures over time. This resulted in the formation of the Tharsis volcanic province, a volcano-strewn region that stretches 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) across the planet's surface.

In 2018, NASA sent the InSight lander to the Red Planet to better understand the planet's interior, which, in turn, could help reveal more about its volcanoes. For years, the lander studied Mars' interior, giving scientists a direct estimate of the crust's thickness.

Using data from InSight, Root and the team ran computer simulations to test what kinds of structures could explain why the volcanic region has dominated one side of Mars. Those models pointed to a plume of unusually light material — called a "negative mass anomaly," or something less dense than the rock that surrounds it — in the mantle beneath the Tharsis region.

According to the researchers, this anomaly may explain how the Tharsis region became so large and full of volcanoes. It could also signal that fresh volcanic activity on Mars may be possible in the future.

"The negative or light mass anomaly will move upwards and hit the lithosphere of Mars, introducing melt pockets that have the potential to penetrate the crust and erupt as volcanoes," Root said. (The lithosphere is a single rigid outer shell approximately 310 miles (500 km) thick.

A solution to spin?

The researchers then asked whether that same hidden plume of material could also explain Mars' strange spin rate. Earlier measurements comparing data from the Viking landers, which explored Mars in the 1970s, with data from InSight showed that Mars' day is shrinking by roughly 70 microseconds per year. That means the planet is rotating slightly faster over time.

Root and his team used their simulations to calculate whether this less-dense material underneath Tharsis could shift mass inside Mars enough to influence the planet's spin.

"With some simple back-on-the-envelope calculations, we can explain the order of magnitude of the observed speed up," Root said. "Of course more complicated modeling will be needed to actually link this better."

Root compared this process to someone spinning in a desk chair while holding heavy books. If the books are pulled inward, the spin speeds up. Mars may be doing something similar with this less-dense material.

"A negative mass flowing upwards means something heavier needs to go down, and because the mass anomaly is located on the equator of Mars, this means the heavier mass is going closer to [the] rotation axis, hence a speed up," Root said.

Besides being a possible solution to some of Mars' biggest mysteries, these models could help scientists better understand how rocky planets cool and eventually die. Mars is much smaller than Earth, so researchers have long assumed it lost its internal heat relatively quickly. But if the Red Planet still has enough energy to drive deep mantle motion, that suggests smaller worlds may stay active longer than expected.

"I would love to show that Mars is more interesting than was assumed," Root said.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Mar. 25 to make clear there isn't currently an active volcano on Mars, as a previous headline suggested. The new discovery hints that fresh volcanic eruptions may be possible in the future, and that Mars is not volcanically dead after all.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

NASA's Artemis II mission will soon send astronauts on a trip around the moon, if the current plans hold. But why is the U.S. so eager to revisit the moon for the first time in more than 50 years?

NASA has promised that returning to the moon will lead to new scientific discoveries, bring economic benefits, and inspire a new generation of explorers. It's also no secret that China threatens to overtake the U.S. as the leader in space exploration, and the U.S. doesn't want to fall behind.

From a scientific perspective, humanity still has much to learn about the moon. Earth's natural satellite has a long history preserved in its rocks, and it could help researchers better understand our own planet, the solar system and the universe at large.

The moon and Earth are like twins that have been dancing around each other since the beginning of the solar system around 4.5 billion years ago, said Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. This means they have a shared history of impacts from asteroids, comets and other objects,

"It just has this 4-and-a-half-billion-year record of what has happened on its surface," Russell told Live Science. "We can see how affected it has been by impacts, which have also happened to the Earth, but we don't see evidence for that on the Earth so easily."

Biological processes and weather-fueled erosion obscure Earth's impact history. The moon, on the other hand, has a thin atmosphere, no weather and no life, so its impact craters can be preserved almost indefinitely. These conditions also provide other research opportunities.

"It's kind of a great laboratory about what happens to geology if there isn't any water or air," Russell said. "We can understand these very fundamental [geological] processes much more easily in many cases by looking at them on the moon."

Artemis

Artemis II is the second of five initial missions in the Artemis program, which aims to establish a long-term U.S. presence on the moon for the first time. The inaugural Artemis mission, Artemis I, was an uncrewed 26-day flight around the moon in 2022. Artemis II is the first crewed spaceflight in the program and is scheduled to send four astronauts on a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth as soon as April 1.

Each Artemis mission is meant to build on its predecessor. Artemis I laid the groundwork for Artemis II, and Artemis II is about testing systems ahead of Artemis III, Artemis IV and Artemis V. The latter two missions aim to put astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028, with Artemis V laying the foundation for what NASA claims will be a permanent lunar base.

NASA famously took 12 astronauts to the lunar surface as part of the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972. Russell noted that lunar samples collected during the Apollo missions have kept scientists busy for more than 50 years, but the Apollo astronauts explored only some of the lunar surface on the near side of the moon, and only its equatorial region.

"It's sort of like having several expeditions to the Sahara Desert and saying, OK, now we understand the Earth," Russell said. "That's why it's important to go back to the moon and, particularly, go to different areas. This is where Artemis is really exciting. The future Artemis mission will go to the lunar south pole, which is an area that really hasn't been explored before."

The moon's south pole is a prime location for water ice, which is thought to be concentrated in the polar regions of the lunar surface. Studying this water ice provides scientists with an opportunity to learn more about Earth's history with water.

"We want to know how the moon got that water, and the reason we want to know that is because how the moon got its water is probably how the Earth got its water," Russell said.

Traveling to the moon with a crew will also enable mission scientists to pursue another, perhaps more disturbing, goal of the Artemis program — investigating the effects of space travel on human physiology. The Artemis II flight is an opportunity for new studies of astronaut health, including how space travel influences the body, mind and behavior, and how those impacts could affect future missions, according to NASA. This is one of many ways the lunar missions are potential stepping stones to deeper space exploration.

That's because the Artemis program is meant to advance technologies and develop infrastructure that will be necessary for sending astronauts to Mars. Space exploration is difficult, dangerous and expensive, so NASA needs to test its systems and its astronauts on the moon before sending them to farther destinations. Establishing a lunar base could be key to traveling to Mars.

The moon has resources that should make space more accessible. For example, NASA has claimed that if it can harvest the moon's water, the space agency can use it to help make drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel — although this remains unproven. Shooting for the moon fulfills a broader strategy to find and use resources off Earth, which could make space exploration cheaper because not everything is made on Earth and transported elsewhere.

Speaking of money, there's a potential lunar economy to consider. NASA has said that its moon strategy stimulates the commercial space industry and creates business opportunities in ways that could foster a lunar economy. The lunar economy currently stems from NASA working with private companies that provide commercial deliveries to support the space agency's mission. Essentially, NASA pays companies to take stuff to the moon. The space agency currently has 15 of these commercial lunar delivery contracts scheduled to be completed by 2028, according to NASA. However, once humans start colonizsing the moon, it could also open up valuable mining opportunities.

Moon mining has the potential to become a billion-dollar industry. The moon harbors resources like rare earth elements, which are mined for electronics on Earth, as well as a potential gold mine in its stocks of helium-3, which could eventually be used in nuclear fusion reactors to make near-limitless clean energy.

The new space race

While the initial space race was between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century, nations are once again racing for control of the final frontier.

Although the U.S., China and Russia are the main competitors in the "new space race," more than 80 countries now have a presence in space, according to Royal Museums Greenwich in the U.K. Beyond commercial interests, access to space plays an increasingly important role in a nation's security ‪—‬ and so could the moon.

Robert Braun, head of the space exploration sector at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, recently described the moon as the "ultimate high ground." In a video released by the university, Braun said many nations are heading to the moon because there's a "nexus of security, exploration and economic objectives."

If the U.S. is to win this second race for the moon, then the upcoming Artemis missions will need to remain on schedule. China wants to land its own astronauts on the moon before 2030, which is at most two years after the first Artemis lunar surface missions, assuming they are a success.

Organic molecules discovered within a stone on Mars cannot be fully explained by nonbiological processes, and it's "reasonable to hypothesize" that living things could have formed these odd organic molecules, a NASA-led team reports in a new study. However, this doesn't mean scientists have found definitive proof of life on Mars, they cautioned.

In March 2025, scientists reported the discovery of the largest organic molecules ever found on Mars. These long chains made of hydrogen and carbon may be the fragments of fatty acids, which are often created through biological processes.

In a paper published Feb. 4 in the journal Astrobiology, researchers analyzed numerous ways those organic molecules could have formed. Using mathematical modeling, information from the Curiosity rover, and data from recent radiolysis experiments, which assess how molecules are destroyed by radiation, the researchers rewound the clock by billions of years to extrapolate how abundant the molecules may have been when they were first deposited.

A discovery more than a decade in the making

The organic molecules in question are called alkanes. They are hydrocarbons, long chains of 10 to 12 carbon atoms with multiple hydrogen atoms attached to each carbon. If the ending of their names sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the alkane chemical family includes ethane, methane, propane and butane — though these are much shorter chains. Alkane chains of 12 carbons or more are more likely to be made by biological processes.

These tantalizingly large molecules are embedded within the Cumberland mudstone, a fine-grained sedimentary rock in an ancient Martian lake bed named Yellowknife Bay. Curiosity initially drilled into this stone back in 2013 and has since performed various analyses using its onboard chemistry lab, the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument.

However, researchers discovered the organic molecules only around a year ago, after preheating the sample to 2,012 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius) in a search for amino acids. Instead of the building blocks of proteins, however, they found the traces of the largest organic molecules ever discovered on Mars.

Rewinding the clock on a Martian mudstone

In the recent study, researchers wound back the clock on this sample, extrapolating how abundant these molecules would have been billions of years ago when they were deposited in the mudstone.

The alkanes in the sample have a measured abundance of 30 to 50 parts per billion (ppb), but the Cumberland mudstone has been exposed to the harsh effects of radiation on Mars' surface for about 80 million years. As a result, its organics have been degraded by the eons-long bombardment of energetic particles from the sun and from the universe at large.

"Given the geologic history and thermal maturation of the organics preserved in the Cumberland sample, it is reasonable to presume that the recovered material is only a fraction (possibly several orders of magnitude less) of the primary lipid content that would have been entrained in the sedimentary unit when it was deposited two and a half billion years ago," the researchers explained in the paper.

Using previous radiolysis experiments as a gauge, the researchers calculated a "conservative" initial abundance of 120 to 7,700 ppb for the alkanes, or the fatty acids from which they fragmented. So, could abiotic sources account for substantial quantities of these substances, or did they form through biological processes?

The researchers assessed numerous scenarios. First, they explored a space-based origin. Interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) and meteorites frequently deliver organic molecules to the Martian surface. But the researchers concluded that it is unlikely that these processes account for the organic abundance in the Cumberland sample because IDPs cannot penetrate rock and there are no signs of meteorite impacts.

In the second scenario, organic molecules settle on the surface after separating from the atmosphere, but Mars' ancient atmospheric haze wasn't foggy enough to explain the observed abundance.

Water-rock interactions could have contributed, but they generally produce smaller organic molecules. Fatty acid molecules can occur via a different pathway; but it requires high temperatures, and Cumberland shows no signs of having been appropriately heated.

Proof of alien life?

Despite these ruled-out theories, one non-biological process did hold water: the researchers cannot rule out that some of the organics formed abiotically in Mars' hydrothermal systems and were transported to the surface by watery, organic-rich fluids.

"To be clear, we do not claim that proof of ancient martian life was found in the Cumberland mudstone," the researchers said in the paper.

Still, the Cumberland sample is rich in many biologically implicated molecular goodies. These include clay minerals that form in the presence of water, nutritious nitrates, a type of carbon linked with biological processes, and the sulfur that helps preserve organic molecules.

Gale Crater, the site of Yellowknife Bay, also held water for untold millions of years, ostensibly giving life-forming chemistry plenty of time to mix and match a multitude of molecules.

Yet the Curiosity rover may be limited in its ability to analyze even larger molecules — which are more likely to be associated with biological processes — because of the way it must separate and identify them. Analyses like these, even on Earth, "always have tradeoffs," study co-author Christopher House, geosciences professor at Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, told Live Science via email. "So, Curiosity might be able to find larger organic molecules, but not with the [precision] that made the identification of these specific molecules convincing."

The next step is to perform experimental studies on Earth that mimic the Cumberland mudstone and the Martian environment, in order to ascertain how organic molecules like fatty acids react to Martian conditions. (The ultimate goal is for scientists to get their hands on some real Martian mudstone via a Mars sample-return mission, though that is currently a murky proposition at best.)

The existence of past or present Martian life is also hazy, but there's reason for optimism among ET aficionados. The "researchers say that as the non-biological sources they considered could not fully explain the abundance of organic compounds, it is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that living things could have formed them," NASA officials said in a statement.

Coincidentally, the microbial processes that could have produced these organics may have emerged on Earth around the same time, during the Archean eon. Considering that the Perseverance rover also discovered potential biosignatures in 2025, the answer to the ultimate question is more beguiling than ever.

NASA's Curiosity rover has snapped stunning new photos of giant "spiderwebs" zig-zagging across the surface of Mars. One of these images has revealed never-before-seen, egg-like spheroids covering the sprawling structures — and scientists are struggling to explain them.

Over the last 8 months, Curiosity has been closely examining a series of interconnected rocky ridges, dubbed "boxwork," on the slopes of Mount Sharp, in the Gale Crater. These ridges, which cover an area up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, were created billions of yars ago as ancient Martian groundwater seeped beneath the planet's surface. They were first spotted by orbital spacecraft in 2006, but they have remained largely unexplored until now.

The web-like structures should not be confused with the infamous "spiders on Mars" — a series of geological features that are created when carbon dioxide ice sublimates beneath the Red Planet's surface and look like swarming arachnids when viewed from above. (These faux spiders were also recently recreated on Earth, while a similar "wall demon" was also spotted on Jupiter's moon Europa.)

NASA released Curiosity's first boxwork photos in June 2025, shortly after reaching the rocky ridges. But on Monday (Feb. 23), the agency released two more snaps, which showed the structures in much greater detail.

One of these photos, captured Sept. 26 last year, shows off a ground-level view of the ridges, which stand 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) above Mars' surface. But a second close-up image, snapped on Aug. 21, revealed that some of these ridges are covered in tiny irregular-shaped lumps, or nodules, that have not been seen until now.

These nodules bear a striking resemblance to mini spheroids on the surface of a mysterious "spider egg" rock, which was discovered in the Jezero Crater by NASA's Perseverance rover last year and has an unknown origin. And researchers are also having a hard time explaining exactly how the tiny boxwork "eggs" formed.

"We can't quite explain yet why the nodules appear where they do," Tina Seeger, a planetary scientist at Rice University in Houston who is leading Curiosity's boxwork investigations, said in a statement. "Maybe the ridges were cemented by minerals first, and later episodes of groundwater left nodules around them," Seeger said. But more work is needed to confirm if this is the case.

However, while the nodules and boxwork have an eerily biological appearance, there is no suggestion that they have any direct ties to extraterrestrial life.

Martian spiderwebs

Boxwork is made up of criss-crossing ridges of mineral-rich rocks that litter the surface of Mars. Similar yet smaller structures are found on Earth, predominantly within caves, and form when calcite-rich water flows between rocks that are eventually eroded, much like how stalagmites and stalactites form, according to the National Speleological Society.

However, on Mars, the boxwork was shaped by the fierce winds that scour the planet's surface: "The bedrock below these ridges likely formed when groundwater trickling through the rock left behind minerals that accumulated in those cracks and fissures, hardening and becoming cementlike," NASA representatives previously wrote. "Eons of sandblasting by Martian wind wore away the rock but not the minerals, revealing networks of resistant ridges within."

The team is particularly interested in the patch of boxwork on Mount Sharp because it formed in isolation and is surprisingly high up the mountain's slopes, which has implications for the planet's puzzling watery past.

"Seeing boxwork this far up the mountain suggests the groundwater table had to be pretty high," Seeger said. This hints that the water in this area may have "lasted much longer than we thought," she added.

Researchers hope that further investigation will also shed light on the specific conditions that formed these structures and whether they might have been favorable to any potential ancient Martian microbes.

"These ridges will include minerals that crystallized underground, where it would have been warmer, with salty liquid water flowing through," Kirsten Siebach, a Curiosity mission scientist at Rice University who has also studied the area, previously said. "Early Earth microbes could have survived in a similar environment. That makes this an exciting place to explore."

Uneven terrain

While the latest stage of Curiosity's mission is yielding fascinating results, it is also proving to be one of the hardest to navigate.

The boxwork is arguably the hardest terrain that the car-sized robot has had to traverse since it landed in the Gale Crater in 2012. The rover must balance along the ridges "like a highway" and avoid slipping "down into the hollows" between them, Ashley Stroupe, a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in the statement.

The task of controlling the rover has also become increasingly challenging due to a gaping hole in one of the robot's wheels, which was first spotted in late 2024.

"There’s always a solution," Stroupe said. "It just takes trying different paths."

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Many tiny specks of ancient water are locked within one of the oldest and most famous Martian meteorites ever to fall to Earth, a new study finds. The surprising discovery, achieved using a new form of "neutron scanning," reveals more clues about the Red Planet's watery past, which may have set the stage for extraterrestrial life to flourish.

Meteorite NWA 7034, more commonly known as Black Beauty, is a roughly 11-ounce (320 grams) chunk of Mars that was ejected when another space rock slammed into the Red Planet. It was discovered in 2011 by nomads in the Moroccan region of the Sahara Desert, although it is unclear when it fell to Earth. The meteorite has since become famous for its dark hue, which has been further accentuated by heavy polishing on one of its faces.

Black Beauty likely originates from the 6-mile-wide (10 kilometers) Karratha crater near Mars' equator, and was ejected into space between 5 million and 10 million years ago, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. However, it is much older than that, and scientists have since dated the coal-like rock to at least 4.44 billion years ago, making it the oldest Martian meteorite found to date.

Researchers have known since 2013 that Black Beauty contained traces of water. More recent analyses of the meteorite have revealed evidence that this water may have been partially heated, raising hopes that Martian microbes may have once thrived in warm waters on the Red Planet.

Until now, however, researchers have had to break off and destroy tiny chunks of the meteorite to properly study the water trapped within it, which has limited what they can learn from it, according to Universe Today.

But in the new study, uploaded Jan. 13 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers report that a new scanning method has allowed them to create the first in-depth analysis of the meteorite's entire water content.

This examination revealed that water likely accounts for around 0.6% of Black Beauty's mass, which equates to a piece of the rock around the size of a human fingernail, according to Universe Today. This may not sound like much, but it is much more than previous estimates had suggested.

Most of this water is locked within tiny fragments, or clasts, of hydrogen-rich iron oxyhydroxide (FeHO₂), which is similar to the main component of rust and forms when iron reacts with water under high pressure, like during a meteor impact.

In the new study, researchers used a version of CT scanning, which builds an internal image of soft objects, like the human body, using X-rays. But instead of using electromagnetic radiation, the team bombarded the meteorite with neutrons, which proved to be particularly good at identifying hydrogen atoms embedded within the extremely dense sample.

You can see this process in action for yourself in a YouTube video shared by one of the researchers.

Water on Mars

It is hard to imagine that the dusty red ball Mars is today was once a water world. However, a mounting body of evidence suggests the planet was once home to large, Earth-like oceans until around 3 billion years ago.

Most of this water has since disappeared, although some of it remains in the form of ice slabs buried near the planet's equator, frosty deposits at the summit of Martian mountains, and a massive subsurface reservoir discovered in 2024.

Black Beauty is widely considered the oldest direct evidence of water on Mars, so it could help reveal how Mars first acquired its once-abundant water. As a result, researchers are keen to further analyze its insides.

Given that NASA recently pulled the plug on its Mars sample-return mission, which would have delivered samples collected by the Perseverance rover back to Earth, meteorites like Black Beauty are the only way to directly study Martian water.

New evidence of ancient rivers suggests Mars may have been a "blue planet," thanks to an ocean spanning its entire northern hemisphere.

Cameras from several Mars orbiters captured the dusty remnants of apparent river deltas, which were described in research published Jan. 7 in the journal NPJ Space Exploration.

The team, led by researchers at the University of Bern, peered at the famed Valles Marineris, which is the largest valley system on Mars and five times longer than the Grand Canyon. Around this Red Planet region, scientists spotted "structures near the canyon system that resemble river deltas on Earth," University of Bern representatives wrote in a statement.

"These structures represent the mouth of a river into an ocean," the statement added. "The new study thus provides clear evidence of a coastline, and consequently, of an earlier ocean on Mars."

Water, water everywhere

Although Mars is dry and dusty today, there are many signs that the planet hosted water in the ancient past. For example, Mars rovers have spotted "blueberry stones" that may include iron oxide minerals containing water. NASA's Curiosity rover imaged possible "ripples" of an ancient riverbed in 2025, and some orbital missions have spotted what may be vast underground stores of water.

The new study focused on Martian geomorphology — the study of the surface and its processes — and employed several spacecraft, including the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (which recently shared its 100,000th photo).

"The unique high-resolution satellite images of Mars have enabled us to study the Martian landscape in great detail by surveying and mapping," Ignatius Argadestya, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Bern Institute of Geological Sciences as well as the university’s Physics Institute, said in the statement.

"When measuring and mapping the Martian images, I was able to recognize mountains and valleys that resemble a mountainous landscape on Earth," Argadestya said. "However, I was particularly impressed by the deltas that I discovered at the edge of one of the mountains."

The team saw possible "fan deltas," which form when debris and sand pile up in still water. The deposits in the Martian imagery appear very similar to active fan deltas on Earth, according to the team; on our planet, these deltas pile up at entry points where rivers flow into the ocean.

All of the "deposits" were mapped at an elevation of between 11,975 and 12,300 feet (3,650 to 3,750 meters) and formed roughly 3.37 billion years ago. Given that all of the deposits are at roughly the same elevation and in a region in the northern lowlands of Mars and Valles Marineris, the researchers argue that these structures mark the boundaries of an ancient shoreline. It's likely the ocean that once flowed there spanned Mars' entire northern hemisphere, the team added.

In part drawing on past research, the scientists say this ancient Martian ocean was at least as large as the present-day Arctic Ocean.

"We are not the first to postulate the existence and size of the ocean," Fritz Schlunegger, a geology professor at the University of Bern and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "However, earlier claims were based on less precise data and partly on indirect arguments. Our reconstruction of the sea level, on the other hand, is based on clear evidence for such a coastline, as we were able to use high-resolution images."

NASA's Mars Sample Return program has been effectively cancelled, meaning the best evidence of life on Mars could be trapped in rock samples that NASA no longer has the budget to collect.

On Monday (Jan. 15), the U.S. Senate approved a spending bill that reverses the Trump administration’s decision to halve federal spending on science and slash NASA's budget by nearly a quarter.

Yet the bill contains an exception: The Mars Sample return program, supposed to return rock samples collected by the Perseverance rover that may contain ancient signs of life, is still cancelled.

"The agreement does not support the existing Mars Sample Return (MSR) program," lawmakers wrote in an accompanying report published on Jan. 6.

There's no guarantee that life ever existed on Mars, but if it did, then the Perseverance rover may already have the evidence. This makes the new bill a major blow to those hoping to examine Perseverance's haul of more than 30 geological samples, which includes a sample NASA described as "the clearest sign of life" ever found on Mars.

But bringing samples from Mars back to Earth was always going to be a costly endeavour, and the MRS program has been fraught with delays and spiraling costs. In January 2025, an independent review board calculated that the price tag could swell to $11 billion, with samples not expected back on Earth until 2040.

In a major overhaul of the program, NASA announced that it would pursue two different strategies for fetching the samples: a tried and tested landing system that deployed a rocket-powered sky crane at a total estimated cost of between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion, and a commercial option whose price would fall somewhere between $5.8 billion and $7.1 billion. NASA planned to announce a decision between these options in the latter half of 2026.

Yet while the Senate’s move ostensibly supports the White House's bid to kill the program, the funding bill could leave NASA space to revive the MSR. The bill, which recognizes that technologies developed as part of the MSR program were critical to the success of future space missions and human exploration of the moon and Mars, allocates $110 million to the Mars Future Missions program, including existing MSR efforts for "radar, spectroscopy, entry, descent, and landing systems, and translational precursor technologies."

In other words, there's funding for some of the tech that the program was working to develop, while falling far short of the total estimated mission costs. The allocation of $110 million nevertheless gives hope for the future of sample return, according to The Planetary Society, which campaigned against more severe proposed cuts to NASA's science program.

The new bill pledges $24.4 billion to NASA, with $7.25 billion of that assigned to the space agency's Science Mission Directorate. That means Congress only cut the NASA science portion of the budget by 1% compared to last year — a significantly more modest reduction than the 47% cut proposed by the Trump administration.

Lawmakers also committed funds to other NASA science projects in the bill. The agreement allocates $500 million for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan, $208 million for the active James Webb Space Telescope and $300 million for the recently completed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is set to hunt for alien worlds and search for the true nature of dark matter when it launches as early as this fall.

The funding bill now awaits President Trump’s signature to become law.

If the U.S. does abandon the dream of returning samples from Mars, it will leave China without competition. China's Tianwen-3 sample return mission aims to collect fewer samples in a more accessible and less promising site than where Perseverance has looked for potential signs of life. However, the Tianwen-3 mission is scheduled to launch in 2028 and return rocks in 2031. If sample return is a race, then China could be set to win it.

"It is difficult to understand how the cancellation of MSR is anything but an admission that returning samples from Mars is too hard for the United States," Victoria Hamilton, leading space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and chair of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), told Live Science's sister-site Space.com on Jan. 12. "How do we expect to be successful at something orders of magnitude more ambitious and costly as the Moon to Mars program, where human lives are at stake?"

The idea of humans living beyond Earth was once only possible in science fiction, but now space agencies are making plans to bring space colonization closer to reality. NASA and SpaceX are exploring long-term missions to the moon and Mars, while astronomers continue to discover potentially habitable exoplanets orbiting distant stars beyond our solar system.

Supporters of planetary colonization argue that becoming a multi-planet species could safeguard us from potentially Earth-ending events. However, it will require an enormous effort to colonize another planet or moon. And if we look beyond Mars, potentially habitable planets may take thousands of years to reach.

But as technology advances and space agencies consider long-term human settlements on other planets, a more fundamental issue now beckons — not whether we can expand to other worlds, but whether we should.

What's your take? Answer our poll below and share the reasoning behind your choice in the comments.

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NASA's cleanrooms rank among the cleanest spaces on Earth, and for good reason — these sterile spaces are fortified to prevent even the hardiest Earth microbes from hitching a ride to other worlds aboard NASA spacecraft. Yet even in the most sterile places on Earth, life finds a way.

Now, experts plan to test these newfound bugs inside a "planetary simulation chamber" that could reveal whether these microbes, or ones with similar adaptations, could survive a trip through space to Mars, possibly contaminating the alien worlds on arrival.

Earlier this year, scientists identified more than two dozen previously unknown bacterial species lurking in the Kennedy Space Center cleanrooms in Florida, where NASA assembled its Phoenix Mars Lander in 2007. The discovery showed that despite constant scrubbing, harsh cleaning chemicals and extreme nutrient scarcity, some microbes evolved a suite of genetic tricks that allowed them to persist in these punishing environments.

"It was a genuine 'stop and re-check everything' moment," study co-author Alexandre Rosado, a professor of Bioscience at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, told Live Science about the findings, which were described in a paper published in May in the journal Microbiome. While there were relatively few of these microbes, they persisted for a long time and in multiple cleanroom environments, he added.

Identifying these unusually hardy organisms and studying their survival strategies matters, the researchers say, because any microbe capable of slipping through standard cleanroom controls could also evade the planetary-protection safeguards meant to prevent Earth life from contaminating other worlds.

When asked whether any of these microbes might, in theory, tolerate conditions during a journey to Mars' northern polar cap, where Phoenix landed in 2008, Rosado said several species do carry genes that may help them adapt to the stresses of spaceflight, such as DNA repair and dormancy-related resilience. But he cautioned that their survival would depend on how they handle harsh conditions a microbe would face both during space travel and on Mars — factors the team didn't test — including exposure to vacuum, intense radiation, deep cold and high levels of UV at the Martian surface.

To explore that question, the researchers are now building a planetary simulation chamber at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia to expose the bacteria to Mars-like and space-like conditions, Rosado said. The chamber, now in its final assembly phase, with pilot experiments expected to begin in early 2026, is engineered to mimic stresses such as the low, carbon-dioxide-rich air pressure of Mars, high radiation, and the extreme temperature swings the microbes would face during spaceflight. These controlled environments will allow scientists to investigate how hardy microbes adapt and survive under combinations of stresses comparable to those encountered during spaceflight or on the Martian surface, said Rosado.

'Cleanrooms don't contain 'no life"

NASA's spacecraft-assembly cleanrooms are engineered to be hostile to microbes — a cornerstone of the agency's efforts to prevent Earth organisms from hitchhiking to worlds beyond Earth — through continuously filtered air, strict humidity control and repeated treatments using chemical detergents and UV light, among other measures.

Even so, "cleanrooms don't contain 'no life,'" said Rosado. "Our results show these new species are usually rare but can be found, which fits with long-term, low-level persistence in cleanrooms."

During the Phoenix lander's assembly at the Kennedy Space Center's Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, a team led by study co-author Kasthuri Venkateswaran, who is a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, collected and preserved 215 bacterial strains from the cleanroom floors. Some samples were gathered before the spacecraft arrived in April 2007, again during assembly and testing in June, and once more after the spacecraft moved to the launch pad in August, according to the study.

At the time, researchers lacked the technology to classify new species precisely or in large numbers. But DNA technology has advanced dramatically in the 17 years since that mission, and today scientists can sequence almost every gene these microbes carry and compare their DNA to broad genetic surveys of microbes collected from cleanrooms in later years. This allows scientists "to study how often and for how long these microbes appear in different places and times, which wasn't possible in 2007," said Rosado.

Further analysis revealed a suite of survival strategies. Many of the newly identified species carry genes that help them resist cleaning chemicals, form sticky biofilms that anchor them to surfaces, repair radiation-damaged DNA or produce tough, dormant spores — adaptations that help them survive in tucked-away corners or microscopic cracks, the study reports. This makes the microbes "excellent test organisms" for validating the decontamination protocols and detection systems that space agencies rely on to keep spacecraft sterile, Rosado said.

From a broader research standpoint, Rosado said the next step is coordinated, long-term sampling across multiple cleanrooms using standardized methods, paired with controlled experiments that measure microbes' survival limits and stress responses, said Rosado.

"This would give us a much clearer picture of which traits truly matter for planetary protection and which might have translational value in biotechnology or astrobiology," he said.

A few months from now, a NASA spacecraft called the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will begin its 20th year of observing the Red Planet from above. And, like most 20-year-olds on Earth, MRO's camera roll is absolutely packed.

According to NASA, MRO has just taken its 100,000th photo of the Martian surface using its HiRISE camera. Put another way, that's an average of 5,000 photos a year, 417 photos a month, or about 14 a day every day since March 2006.

The new milestone image, snapped on Oct. 7, shows a shadowy wasteland of mesas, craters and dunes known as Syrtis Major. This region is just southeast of Jezero Crater, the ancient lakebed where NASA's Perseverance rover is hunting for evidence of life, and appears as an enormous dark spot when seen from afar by space telescopes like Hubble.

MRO has observed the region many times before, and has previously turned up evidence that the sand dunes there are slowly migrating across the planet's surface.

"HiRISE hasn't just discovered how different the Martian surface is from Earth, it's also shown us how that surface changes over time," Leslie Tamppari MRO's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "We've seen dune fields marching along with the wind and avalanches careening down steep slopes."

Studying how the Red Planet changes over time will help demystify the forces that govern it, and help reveal whether it was ever a lush waterworld like Earth. Launched from Florida on Aug. 12, 2005, and inserted into Mars orbit on March 10, 2006, the MRO will continue its mission to photograph the planet as long as it's able.

Occasionally, MRO does take a break from its primary mission to gaze off into space. In October, the satellite looked skyward to snap a shot of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed about 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) from the spacecraft — significantly closer that the comet got to Earth at its closest point on Dec. 19.

While MRO wasn't designed to observe small, fast-moving objects at such great distances, it nevertheless provided early confirmation that 3I/ATLAS showed the telltale characteristics of a natural comet, including a small nucleus enshrouded in a bright coma of gas and dust.

The final frontier is an unendingly beautiful expanse filled with unimaginable wonders, making it the perfect sandbox for photographers, astronomical observatories and space-based telescopes to capture incredible images that we can hardly fathom. And 2025 was no different.

This year, we covered a range of stunning space images, from an eye-catching alien comet and a planetary parade portrait to the first Vera C. Rubin photos and otherworldly animal lookalikes. Here are 10 of our absolute favorites.

Alien visitor transforms into a "cosmic rainbow"

The biggest space news story this year was undoubtedly the arrival of the third-ever interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which has dominated headlines and astronomers' attention ever since it was first spotted speeding through the solar system in early July. As a result, there has been no shortage of stunning shots of the alien comet.

Our favorite is this timelapse image captured by the Gemini North telescope on the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. The image was created by combining 16 different photos using multiple colored filters to create a giant cosmic rainbow.

Read more: Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS transforms into a giant 'cosmic rainbow' in trippy new telescope image

"The Fall of Icarus"

One of the most unbelievable photos of 2025 was this solar spectacle, dubbed The Fall of Icarus, which perfectly captured the moment a skydiver fell directly in front of the sun.

Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured this shot in early November, at a distance of around 8,000 feet (2,440 meters) from the skydiver, YouTuber Gabriel C. Brown. It took six attempts to properly line up Brown with the solar surface before the thrill-seeker leapt from a small propeller-powered craft at an altitude of around 3,500 feet (1,070 m).

"It was a narrow field of view, so it took several attempts to line up the shot," McCarthy told Live Science. "Capturing the sun is something I'm quite familiar with, but this added new challenges."

Read more: Astrophotographer snaps 'absolutely preposterous' photo of skydiver 'falling' past the sun's surface

Vera C. Rubin's stream of stars

In June, the most powerful digital camera on Earth winked on. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile's Atacama desert revealed its first-ever images in June. These debut photos were chock-full of cosmic treasures, including the spiral galaxy M61 (shown here), which researchers noticed was being trailed by a massive stellar tail around the same size as the Milky Way.

We can look forward to many more spellbinding shots from Rubin in the coming years as it begins its decade-long survey of the night sky.

Read more: First Vera Rubin Observatory image reveals hidden structure as long as the Milky Way trailing behind a nearby galaxy

Perfect planetary parade portrait

In late January and early February, up to six of the solar system's planets were simultaneously visible in the night sky in what astronomers refer to as a "planetary parade." This particular parade was one of the best in recent years, allowing astrophotographers to snap several stunning pics of the event.

Our favorite pick of the bunch is this planetary portrait from French astrophotographer Gwenaël Blanck, which he digitally edited to show each planet alongside the sun in the order of distance from Earth. Blanck snapped each of the individual worlds within 80 minutes of one another.

Read more: Parisian photographer produces phenomenal, perfectly-proportioned 'planetary parade' portrait

Giant "diamond ring" shines in X-ray

All that glitters is not gold, and in this scintillating starscape, released in November, it is high-energy X-rays that sparkle like a giant ring.

This object, dubbed a "diamond ring," is an expanding bubble of gas in a star-forming region of the Cygnus constellation. The glowing bubble is around 20 light-years across and is around 400,000 years old. It was photographed by NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which previously scanned the night sky from a telescope onboard a Boeing 747SP aircraft, at an altitude of more than 45,000 feet (13,700 m).

The cosmic ring is not to be confused with Einstein rings, which are rings of light created by gravitational lensing.

Read more: Giant 'diamond ring' sparkles 4,500 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation

A cosmic butterfly spreads its wings

JWST has, yet again, captured some stunning photos in 2025, including the fiery Cigar Galaxy, a tantruming stellar toddler and a "starlit mountaintop" nebula. However, our favorite is this striking portrait of the "Butterfly Star," IRAS 04302+2247.

The insect imposter's shining wings are made from a mini nebula of stellar material leftover from a supernova. This nebula is bisected by a protoplanetary disk that surrounds the baby star like a cosmic cocoon, and just happens to be aligned with Earth so that the two halves of the nebula are seen from side-on. It is located around 525 light-years away, in a star-forming region, known as the Taurus Molecular Cloud.

Read more: James Webb telescope finds a warped 'Butterfly Star' shedding its chrysalis

Arsia Mons rises

Speaking of Mars, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter also captured this stunning shot of a giant dead volcano peeking above the clouds on the Red Planet, as eerie green lights dance above the Martian horizon.

The mountain in the image is Arsia Mons, which stands at more than 12 miles (19 kilometers) above the surface of the previously volcanic Tharsis plateau. The extinct volcano is more than twice as tall as Mount Everest, but around 4 miles (6 km) shorter than Mars' tallest peak, Olympus Mons.

The green lights look like auroras. But they are actually just an effect of the image being partially captured using infrared light, which emanates from the planet's wispy atmosphere.

Read more: NASA spots Martian volcano twice the height of Mount Everest bursting through the morning clouds

Seen by the "Eye of Sauron"

There is no escaping the dark lord of Mordor's malevolent gaze, even from halfway across the universe. That's the impression given by this photo, dubbed the "Eye of Sauron," which playfully references J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings."

The "eye" is actually the magnetic field of a supercharged energy jet being shot into space by a quasar — a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. This quasar, dubbed PKS 1424+240, is billions of light-years from Earth and has one of its jets pointed almost directly at our planet, allowing researchers to peer directly through its "jet cone" and map out the magnetic swirls within.

Read more: Giant, cosmic 'Eye of Sauron' snapped staring directly at us in stunning 15-year time-lapse photo

New "heavenly" pillars emerge

This ethereal image shows a set of stellar structures reminiscent of the famous "Pillars of Creation," first seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. The structure is named Ua 'Ōhi'a Lani, which means the "heavenly rains" in Hawaiin, and this image of it was taken by the Gemini North telescope.

What you are seeing is two distinct regions: the twinkling blue stars of a star cluster, named NGC 6823, overlapping the veil of red gas that comprises a more distant emission nebula, dubbed NGC 6820. The ethereal pillars are made from additional gas and dust that have been sculpted by the foreground stars' intense radiation.

The original pillars of creation were also recently given a glow-up by JWST, which captured the iconic cosmic structures using infrared light.

Read more: 'Heavenly rains': Ethereal structure in the sky rivals 'Pillars of Creation'

Astronaut snaps a giant "jellyfish" over Earth

As incredible as it is to point our cameras out into the universe, space also provides a unique angle of our own planet. And that's exactly the case in our final photo, which shows off a giant, electrifying "jellyfish" hovering above Earth.

The luminous branching structure was snapped by NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers in July, while onboard the ISS. It shows a type of transient luminous event that researchers commonly call sprites. In this case, the red jellyfish-like sprite formed at the summit of a rare upward-shooting "gigantic jet" of lightning, up to 50 miles (80 km) above the U.S.-Mexico border.

If you liked this photo, then be sure to check out Live Science's weekly Earth from space series for more incredible images of our planet from above.

Read more: Astronaut snaps giant red 'jellyfish' sprite over North America during upward-shooting lightning event

Want to see more amazing images of the cosmos?Be sure to check out Live Science's Space Photo of the Week series, or peep our favorite space shots from 2024 or this gallery of stunning James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images.

A giant, city-size "butterfly" that was carved into the surface of Mars millions of years ago just got a new photo op thanks to European Space Agency (ESA) scientists. The beautiful Martian bug, which sports a pair of smooth rocky wings, is a stunning reminder of the Red Planet's violent and watery past, experts say.

The so-called butterfly is an asymmetrical impact crater, created when a hefty asteroid smashed into Mars in the distant past at an unusually low angle. It is located in the Idaeus Fossae region — an extremely uneven and previously volcanic region in Mars' northern lowlands — and is around 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) from east to west and 9.3 miles (15 km) from north to south. This makes the crater almost large enough to fit the island of Manhattan across its floor.

The latest images of the oval crater, which remains unnamed, were digitally created using topographical data collected by ESA's Mars Express orbiter, which has been scanning the Red Planet since 2003. The data was also used to create a short video that calls the crater a "cosmic butterfly" and shows what it would look like if you were to circle it in a helicopter (see below).

Unlike most other impact craters in the solar system, which are circular and eject material equally around their edges, the shallow angle of this incoming asteroid caused it to unevenly distribute the debris, creating the crater's wings.

"The collision caused two distinct lobes of material to be flung outwards to the crater's north and south, creating two outstretched 'wings' of raised ground," ESA representatives wrote in a statement describing the butterfly. This uneven impact also sculpted the crater's floor into an "irregular," walnut-like shape, they added.

Craters like this are commonly known as butterflies because of their rounded shape and rocky wings, and they are exceedingly rare. However, this is not the first one to be spotted on Mars.

In 2006, around three years into the Mars Express orbiter's mission, the ESA spacecraft snapped a butterfly crater in the Hesperia Planum region in Mars' southern highlands. This crater is much more elongated than the Idaeus Fossae crater and arguably has a much more bug-like appearance. (Mars' southern highlands and northern lowlands lie on either side of a geographical anomaly that "splits" the planet near the equator.)

Studying these anomalous craters helps scientists better understand the angle and force of the impacts that formed them. It can also reveal clues about the hidden layers of Mars' surface and what conditions existed when the collisions occurred, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

In the latest case, the ESA team noticed that the wings of the butterfly are much smoother than its bobbly, walnut-like floor. This suggests that this material has been "fluidized," meaning that it has been mixed with water. This most likely happened when Martian ice buried beneath the crater was melted by the impact and released into the resulting explosion, ESA representatives wrote.

It is currently unclear exactly when the newly imaged insect crater was formed or how large and fast the meteor that birthed it was. However, fragments of the space rock could potentially remain within the crater.

Animals on Mars

This is not the first time that scientists have found animal impostors lurking on Mars' surface.

NASA's various Mars rovers have found multiple rocks that bear a striking similarity to living creatures, including a turtle poking its head out from its shell, which was snapped by Perseverance in August, and a coral-like structure photographed by the Curiosity rover in 2022.

From above, certain geological features also take on a surprising likeness to wildlife, such as the infamous "spiders on Mars," which are cracks that form when ice sublimates beneath the Martian surface and look like swarming arachnids.

In September 2024, the Mars Express orbiter also helped to reveal a hidden dog-shaped blob lurking beneath Mars' North Pole.

These animal associations are often made due to pareidolia — a psychological phenomenon in which the human mind perceives a familiar pattern, such as a face or image, in random objects or structures.

Some of the biggest names in the space industry recently came together to celebrate the best and brightest people in the field at the inaugural Global Space Awards. The lavish event, which also championed the life and legacy of the late NASA astronaut James Lovell, placed particular emphasis on the importance of innovation and sustainability in the future of space exploration.

On Dec. 5, dozens of researchers, science communicators, celebrities and industry experts met at the Natural History Museum in London to wine, dine and strut the red carpet, all under the illuminated skeleton of a giant blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) and the watchful gaze of a statue of Charles Darwin.

More than 40 finalists — who were recently unveiled in a livestream from a balloon hovering high up in Earth's stratosphere — were vying for eight different awards, having been narrowed down from more than 500 entries from 38 countries.

The award ceremony was hosted by theoretical physicist and science communicator Brian Greene, a researcher of string theory at Columbia University, who was keen to help share what the space industry has to offer.

"It's really exciting to have awards that are focused on the final frontier," Greene told Live Science at the event. "This [industry] is necessary for the future of humankind," he added. "This is a wonderful ceremony to really put a spotlight on things that matter."

Other guests, including the European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Tim Peake — who spent around six months living on the International Space Station in 2016 — highlighted the various ways that the space sector can benefit people on Earth, including developing pharmaceuticals, monitoring Earth’s changing climate and building orbital data centers. "There's so much happening in the space industry on a number of different levels, and it is playing such a huge part in everybody's lives at the moment," Peake told Live Science at the event.

Meanwhile, British science communicator Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock was quick to point out that there is still more to be done to close the gap between space and the general public. "I think so many people aren't aware of what we do in the space industry," she told Live Science. "[It's important] to encourage the next generation to come and join us."

Several scientists were up for awards, including Benjamin Pope — an astronomer and data scientist at Macquarie University in Australia, who was shortlisted for the SuperScaler of the Year Award for his work helping to improve the imaging capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope.

The winner of the Science Breakthrough Award was Beatriz Sánchez-Cano, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester, who is leading ESA's proposed Mars Magnetosphere Atmosphere Ionosphere and Space-weather Science (M-MATISSE) mission. The mission aims to monitor how space weather impacts the Red Planet.

"I still can't believe they said my name," Sánchez-Cano told Live Science in an email after the event. "It was such a unique and beautiful moment, one I'll always remember."

Another big winner was U.K.-based company Space Forge, which took home the Sustainability for Earth Award for its work on creating semiconductors in space in order to help develop better ways of generating renewable energy.

Sustainability was a key theme among multiple winners. Tahara Dawkins, the director of Policy for U.S.-based satellite company Astroscale and an advocate for preserving low Earth orbit from space junk, took home the Playmaker of the Year Award. Astroscale also won the Sustainability for Space Award for their work in the same field.

Other private space companies were also up for awards, including Axiom Space, which is building next-generation space suits and preparing to construct one of the first private space stations; and Spin Launch, which recently revealed its plans to launch satellites into space using a "giant spinning cannon." (Neither of these companies won the awards they were respectively shortlisted for.)

Events like the Global Space Awards are a great way for different companies to come together and share ideas, Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space, told Live Science at the event. "Being here and being able to represent what we're doing and collaborate with all the different leaders in the space economy is very important for us."

However, the biggest cheer of the night went to the family of the late Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell, who recently died at age 97 in August. Lovell's children, Susan, Jeffrey and Barbara, were the joint recipients of the James Lovell Legacy Award, which will, in the future, be presented to individuals who exemplify the astronaut's values.

Jeffrey Lovell told Live Science that the family was incredibly proud to be "recognizing our dad, not only for what he did for mankind, but the type of person he was." He would be deeply honored "to see future generations continue what he started," he added.

Scientists have found that time moves slightly faster on the Red Planet than it does on Earth. Clocks on Mars tick, on average, 0.477 milliseconds (477 microseconds) faster over 24 hours when measured from Earth compared with time recorded on our planet, a new study finds. Knowing this difference may help in establishing an "internet" across the solar system.

Over the next few decades, humanity's presence in the solar system is set to boom, with missions like those in NASA's Artemis program expected to pave the way for permanent settlements on the moon and beyond. Developing a standard clock for each cosmic locale would help astronauts navigate these worlds while coordinating communications with Earth.

But there's a catch: Time doesn't run at the same pace everywhere. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity shows that time in a given area depends on how strong the gravity is there. Clocks in areas of high gravity tick more slowly than those where gravity is weaker, which is why people residing atop mountains age a fraction of a millisecond faster than sea-level dwellers. (Time appears to move faster at high altitudes, where Earth's gravitational tug is reduced.)

Additionally, time on a planet depends on its velocity around its parent star; the faster the orbital rate, the faster the passage of time.

Time keeps on slippin'

Together, velocity and gravity cause time on different solar system bodies to tick at different rates when measured from Earth. A 2024 study calculated that clocks on the moon would run an average of 56 microseconds (millionths of a second) faster than Earth-based ones. Having established this, the researchers — Neil Ashby and Bijunath Patla, both physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado — turned their attention to Mars.

First, they chose a reference level on Mars — an equivalent to Earth's sea level called the areoid. Then, they used physics-based formulas to calculate how, at the areoid, Mars' and Earth's gravities and velocities would influence Martian time. Although Mars' slower orbital speed relative to Earth slows down Mars-based clocks, the planet's weaker surface gravity — five times lesser at the areoid than Earth's sea-level gravity — speeds them up much more.

But this analysis neglected the orbits' shapes. Mars' orbit is more egg-shaped than Earth's, having been contorted by the gravitational tugs of Earth and its moon. (Mars' moons, Deimos and Phobos, have a negligible impact, Patla told Live Science in an email, because of their puny size. They're just a few miles wide, compared with 2,159 miles, or 3,475 kilometers, for Earth's moon.) So, Ashby and Patla factored Mars' orbital shape, the sun's gravity and Earth moon's gravity into their equations.

Setting clocks on Mars

The analysis showed that Martian clocks tick faster, when measured from Earth, than Earth-based ones by an average of 477 microseconds per Earth day. Strikingly, though, this value varies daily by 226 microseconds (about half the offset's value itself) over a Martian year. The variation stems from the egg-like shape of Mars’ orbit and changes in the gravitational tugs of its celestial neighbors as they approach and twirl away from Mars.

Additionally, the researchers found that the clocks change by an extra 40 microseconds over seven of Mars' synodic periods, with a synodic period being how long the planet takes to reappear in the same position of the sky.

"The fluctuation and the Earth-Mars planetary dance (synodic period) variation was a surprise," Patla said, because their magnitudes were larger than he expected.

The findings, published Dec. 1 in The Astronomical Journal, will help scientists synchronize time across the solar system, allowing them to establish rapid communications channels in an interplanetary internet in the distant future, although the large fluctuations will complicate this effort, Patla said. He added that the study "provides a baseline for future tests of general relativity and fundamental physics, which explore the nature of spacetime."

But the calculations were still inaccurate by about 100 nanoseconds (0.1 microseconds) per day over long timescales, because tiny shifts in the planets' movements weren't factored in. Although this imprecision is minuscule, it would mean resetting Martian clocks every 100 days.

The study also didn't account for factors like how the planets' orbits precess, or gradually wobble, and the effects of Earth's and Mars' gravitational quadrupole moments, which is a measure of how their mass is arranged within their structures. Taken together, these limitations may make it more challenging to obtain more precise time calculations, the researchers said.

Mars was once home to wet, humid areas that received heavy rainfall, similar to tropical regions on Earth, a new study of unusually bleached rocks suggests.

Researchers were intrigued by peculiar light-colored rocks that NASA's Perseverance rover discovered on the Martian surface. Upon closer inspection, the rocks turned out to be kaolinite, an aluminum-rich type of clay, the scientists reported in the study, which was published Dec. 1 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

On Earth, kaolinite almost always forms under very warm, steamy conditions, such as those found in tropical rainforests. It typically forms in rocks that have been stripped of all other minerals by millions of years of regular rainfall. But present-day Mars is famously cold and dry.

"So when you see kaolinite on a place like Mars, where it's barren, cold and with certainly no liquid water at the surface, it tells us that there was once a lot more water than there is today," Adrian Broz, a soil scientist at Purdue University and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Broz and his team compared the structure of the Martian kaolinite, which had been examined by multiple instruments on Perseverance, with terrestrial samples taken from South Africa and San Diego. The rocks appeared strikingly similar, suggesting they formed in similar ways.

Satellite images of the Martian surface appear to show larger kaolinite deposits elsewhere on the planet. However, Perseverance and other rovers have not explored those areas yet.

"Until we can actually get to these large outcroppings with the rover, these small rocks are our only on-the-ground evidence," Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and co-author of the study, said in the statement.

The presence of kaolinite on Mars adds weight to the hypothesis that the Red Planet was a wet oasis at some point in the distant past, though exactly when and how it dried up are still debated.

The leading hypotheses suggest that the planet lost its water sometime between 3 billion and 4 billion years ago, when its magnetic field weakened enough for solar winds to strip away its atmosphere. But this process was likely complex and multifaceted. Studying these ancient clays could give scientists more insight into how and when Mars lost its water, the researchers said.

It could also provide clues about Mars' potential habitability, Broz said, since "all life uses water."

NASA's Perseverance rover has discovered a highly unusual rock lying on the surface of Mars. The lumpy boulder, which has a metal-rich composition, is most likely a meteorite that crash-landed on the Red Planet — and it's the first one that Perseverance has found during its four-year mission scouring Mars rocks for signs of life.

Perseverance has found many different rocks since landing within Mars' Jezero crater in early 2021, including a "spider-egg" rock, an out-of-place "skull" and, most recently, a bizarre "turtle-shaped" formation. Some of these rocks have also yielded surprising results, such as strange nodules recently found in organic-rich samples, which could be the "clearest sign" yet of past extraterrestrial life on Mars.

Until now, the one thing that all the rocks surveyed by Perseverance had in common was that they originated on Mars. But on Sept. 19, during the 1,629th Sol (Martian day) of the rover's mission, the wandering robot came across an odd-looking boulder while exploring an area of Jezero dubbed "Vernodden." The unusual rock, which measures around 31 inches (80 centimeters) across, has since been named "Phippsaksla" — and is unlikely to have a Martian origin.

"This rock was identified as a target of interest based on its sculpted, high-standing appearance that differed from that of the low-lying, flat and fragmented surrounding rocks," Candice Bedford, a geochemist and mineralogist at Purdue University's Planetary Science department, wrote in a NASA statement.

Analysis of the rock revealed it has a high concentration of iron and nickel, which is unusual in Martian rocks. But these metals are commonly found in meteorites, "suggesting that this rock formed elsewhere in the solar system," Bedford wrote. It is unclear how long it has been on Mars, but it is likely millions, if not billions, of years old.

"This is not the first time a rover has encountered an exotic rock on Mars," Bedford wrote. In fact, three different NASA rovers — Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity — have found potential meteorites during their respective missions, she added. (Of these missions, only Curiosity is still active.)

"As such, it has been somewhat unexpected that Perseverance had not seen iron-nickel meteorites within Jezero crater, particularly given its similar age to Gale crater [where Curiosity currently resides]," Bedford wrote.

Despite finding the potential meteorite roughly two months ago, the discovery has only just been announced due to the recent U.S. government shutdown. The NASA statement about Phippsaksla was originally written on Oct.1, the same day the shutdown began, and was released on Nov. 13, the day after the government reopened.

The shutdown proved to be quite eventful for NASA. Live Science's sister site Space.com recently reported that officials had likely begun implementing the agency's proposed budget cuts during this time, before they had been approved by Congress. And since the shutdown has ended, NASA scientists have been busy sharing previously withheld images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

However, Perseverance remained online throughout the entire shutdown along with several other "mission-critical operations."

Martian meteorites

While finding meteorites on Mars is uncommon, here on Earth we have found lots of space rocks that came from Mars.

These Martian meteorites were ejected by other large meteor impacts on Mars, and later fell to Earth after drifting through space for thousands of years. They are highly sought after by scientists because they can tell us a lot about the rocks on Mars, just like Perseverance.

In 2024, one study found that around 200 of the Martian meteorites that have fallen to Earth originated from just five different impact craters on the Red Planet.

And in July, one Martian meteorite — a 54-pound (24.5 kilograms) space rock dubbed NWA 16788, which crashed into the Sahara desert in 2023 — was sold for $5.3 million at auction, which is a new record for a Martian space rock.

NASA has released a treasure trove of comet 3I/ATLAS images, giving us some of the closest views yet of the interstellar visitor.

The U.S. government shutdown, which ran from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, delayed the release of the highly anticipated images, which include snaps taken from instruments around Mars and the sun over the past several months.

Live Science has rounded up some stand-out shots from the comet 3I/ATLAST image drop for you to enjoy below, while the full gallery is available on NASA's website.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) captured this image of the comet from aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The imager caught sight of comet 3I/ATLAS as the comet zoomed past Mars in early October.

While the comet was much closer to Mars in October than it will ever get to Earth, it still wasn't that close. This image was taken when the comet was around 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) from MRO. For reference, the moon's average distance from Earth is about 239,000 miles (384,000 km). The bright dot represents the comet's main body, or nucleus, while the diffuse cloud of particles around it is 3I/ATLAS' coma — a feature characteristic of most comets that get heated up by the sun while flying through our solar system.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter got this trippy ultraviolet image of comet 3I/ATLAS near Mars (relatively speaking) on Sep. 28. MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph takes advantage of the ultraviolet part of the light spectrum to decipher the chemical composition of objects, according to NASA.

The blue in the image is hydrogen. The blue dot on the left represents hydrogen emitted from comet 3I/ATLAS, while the bright blue on the right is the hydrogen emitted by Mars. The dim blue oval in the middle is background hydrogen flowing through the solar system between planets. Researchers hope to use observations like this one to better understand the comet's makeup.

NASA released this GIF of comet 3I/ATLAS, created using images taken by the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission between Sept. 28 and Oct. 10. The PUNCH mission is made up of four small satellites in low-Earth orbit, focused on the sun. Comet 3I/ATLAS is the white dot in the center image, moving through a stream of blurred light from stars. The bright blob that flashes past the comet is Mars.

Comet 3I/ATLAS is pretty in pink in this observation, thanks to colorized images from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory spacecraft (STEREO-A). The Heliocentric Imager-1 (H1) instrument aboard STEREO-A captured the image in visible light, which was then subsequently colorized to differentiate it from other spacecraft images, according to NASA.

Another image taken by a solar orbiter, this time from the European Space Agency and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). The SOHO mission launched all the way back in 1995 and is the longest-serving sun satellite yet, according to NASA. SOHO snapped this image of comet 3I/ATLAS between Oct. 15 and Oct. 26, while the comet was brightening on the way to its closest encounter with the sun.

This last GIF isn't particularly impressive to look at, but it was taken from the Martian surface, which is pretty cool if you ask us. NASA's Perseverance rover looked up to observe the comet fly by the Red Planet on Oct. 4. Perseverance was investigating Jezero Crater at the time, searching for ancient signs of life.

Since the discovery of comet 3I/ATLAS in July, there has been much speculation that this interstellar visitor could be an alien spacecraft. However, most astronomers are confident that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet from an unknown star system. NASA was keen to stress that the comet was of natural origins when it presented the new images during a stream on Wednesday (Nov. 19).

"This object is a comet," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said during the stream. "It looks and behaves like a comet… and all evidence points to it being a comet. But this one came from outside the solar system, which makes it fascinating, exciting and scientifically very important."

Earthlings will soon have their chance to see NASA's clearest images yet of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, and you can watch it right here.

The space agency recently announced a live news teleconference to take place today (Nov. 19) at 3 p.m. EST, during which NASA scientists and administrators will share and discuss never-before-seen images of the interstellar comet taken by telescopes and spacecraft over the past month or so.

The images will be posted to this NASA page shortly after the event starts, and we will also be covering the latest updates on our live blog.

Why now?

These images have yet to be shared with the public, as a majority of NASA personnel were furloughed during the U.S. government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, preventing the agency from communicating with the public.

It was an unlucky time for NASA to go silent, as comet 3I/ATLAS passed several huge milestones on its one-way trip through our solar system during that period. On Oct. 29, the interstellar comet made its closest approach to the sun, entering its brightest and most active phase as its surface ices started to melt and sublimate (shift from a solid to a gas).

And earlier, on Oct. 3 — just days after the government shutdown began — the comet made its closest approach to Mars, passing within just 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) of the Red Planet and the fleet of NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft stationed there. That may sound like a comically vast distance, but it's the closest look we're likely to get of the interstellar interloper; 3I/ATLAS will get no closer than 170 million miles (270 million km) of Earth at its closest approach to our planet on Dec. 19, according to NASA.

The closest views of 3I/ATLAS so far

On Oct. 7, ESA released its own closest images of the comet taken so far, captured by its ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Mars Express orbiter. However, both of these spacecraft were designed to observe the surface of Mars just a few hundred miles below, not to track high-speed objects millions of miles away. The comet appears as little more than a bright, slinking blur in ESA's images — but, the observations confirmed that 3I/ATLAS bore the telltale cloud of ionized gas (a coma) that's characteristic of natural comets.

ESA scientists also compared the Mars orbiter data with observations from Earth telescopes, allowing them to better triangulate the comet's exact position and significantly narrow down its path through our solar system.

During the news conference, NASA is expected to share images taken by its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera from the days before and after the comet's close approach to Mars, as well as observations from other telescopes, according to the agency's latest announcement.

The live stream will be hosted on the agency's website as well as on YouTube and Amazon Prime. Members of the public are invited to submit questions via the hashtag #AskNASA on social media, some of which may be addressed live on air.

Comet 3I/ATLAS was discovered in late June and confirmed to be an interstellar object in early July. It originates from an unknown star system far beyond our own, and is just the third object of its kind ever detected. Many mysteries about its nature and origins still remain, and dozens of observations from Earth and space-based telescopes are expected to come as the comet barrels toward its closest approach to Earth next month. Spacecraft near Jupiter will also observe it early next year, as the comet makes its final exit from our solar system.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Wednesday (Nov. 19) to indicate that the live stream is today

Researchers have narrowed down the exact route that the interstellar interloper 3I/ATLAS will take as it begins its one-way trip out of the solar system.

Thanks to data collected from the alien comet's recent close flyby of Mars, scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have refined the comet’s trajectory by ten-fold. And this could better help researchers unravel its secrets in the coming months, experts say.

3I/ATLAS is an interstellar object — the third of its kind ever seen — that was first spotted in early July, shooting toward the sun at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). It is a comet that was likely ejected from a star in the "frontier" region of the Milky Way up to 7 billion years ago. Scientists have observed a number of strange characteristics of the comet, including a highly irradiated surface and a puzzling anti-tail. This has led to wild rumors that 3I/ATLAS might be an alien spacecraft, which the majority of astronomers agree are almost certainly untrue.

After passing its closest point to the sun on Oct. 29, 3I/ATLAS has recently reemerged from behind the sun's far-side relative to Earth. The trip around the sun was an eventful one: with the comet experiencing an unexpected brightening event, a temporary color change and a brief vanishing of its tail.

But before this, the comet also had a close encounter with Mars, coming within 18.6 million miles (30 million kilometers) of the Red Planet on Oct. 3.

During the Mars flyby, the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter managed to snap highly detailed photos of 3I/ATLAS streaking toward the sun. By analyzing the orbiter's data from this encounter, ESA scientists have improved predictions of 3I/ATLAS's exit trajectory out of the solar system with a surprising level of success.

"While the scientists initially anticipated a modest improvement, the result was an impressive ten-fold leap in accuracy, reducing the uncertainty of the object’s location," ESA representatives wrote in a statement. "The improved trajectory allows astronomers to aim their instruments with confidence, enabling more detailed science of the third interstellar object ever detected."

Before now, researchers have been relying solely on ground-based observatories or Earth-orbiting spacecraft to track 3I/ATLAS's position, which only provides specific views of the anomalous object. But by using observations from Mars, the ESA team could better "triangulate" the comet's position, similar to how intelligence agencies track mobile phones using multiple cell towers.

However, factoring in the orbiter's precise movements around Mars relative to the comet's trajectory was no easy task. To make the process harder, the spacecraft's Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) is designed to photograph the Red Planet's surface, not objects in space, the researchers wrote.

In fact, the method of imaging space objects with planetary orbiters is so hard that this is the first time that data from one of these spacecraft has been accepted into the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center database, which tracks the movements of all near-Earth objects, researchers wrote.

ESA is now hoping to repeat the trick with its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which will get a good look at 3I/ATLAS later this month, researchers wrote. The agency's researchers have also previously suggested that two of its other spacecraft, Hera and Europa Clipper, could also pass through the comet's tail as it moves away from the sun.

During the recent Mars flyby, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also captured what could potentially be the best ever image of 3I/ATLAS, which some researchers predict could reveal more about its features. Due to the recent government shutdown, NASA has yet to release these images to the public. But recent reports suggest that these images could be released any day now.

3I/ATLAS will reach its closest point to Earth on Dec. 19, when it will reach a minimum distance of 168 million miles (270 million km) from our planet.

Millions of mysterious black streaks littered across the surface of Mars have puzzled scientists for decades, but now researchers may finally have a proper explanation. The new theory also explains why it has taken so long to solve this particular problem.

Martian "slope streaks" are dark albedo features that cover the slopes of topographical features across the Red Planet. They were discovered in the 1970s, and scientists initially assumed they were evidence of landslides caused by melting ice. But while scientists still think that the streaks are the result of landslides, a study published in May revealed that these landslides are actually triggered by "dry processes" that do not involve any water. This narrowed down the list of potential causes but did not conclusively settle the debate around the streaks' origins.

One of the most famous examples of these streaks is on Apollinaris Mons — an extinct shield volcano located just south of Mars' equator. Here, hundreds of parallel streaks can be seen on a single side of a large ridge, giving the structure a "barcode-like" appearance (see below). These streaks appeared at some point between 2013 and 2017, and scientists later realized that they were the result of a nearby meteoroid impact, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

As a result, some researchers assumed that meteoroid impacts and other seismic events, such as marsquakes, are responsible for birthing most slope streaks. But a new study, published Nov. 6 in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that this is not the case.

Instead, an analysis of around 2.1 million slope streaks, photographed by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter between 2006 and 2024, revealed that almost all new streaks are the result of seasonal wind and dust erosion. (The study estimates the total number of slope streaks on Mars to be around 1.6 million, but some streaks were included in multiple image sets.)

"Dust, wind and sand dynamics appear to be the main seasonal drivers of slope streak formation," the study's sole author Valentin Bickel, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who also co-authored the May study, said in a statement. "Meteoroid impacts and quakes seem to be locally distinct, yet globally relatively insignificant drivers [of streak formation]," he added.

Bickel estimates that less than 0.1% of newly formed slope streaks are created by meteoroid impacts or marsquakes.

Bickel's analysis showed that slope streaks are grouped into five key regions across Mars, and that new streaks form in each of these areas when seasonal wind speeds are highest and exceed the threshold for "dust mobilization." Once this threshold has been surpassed, landslides can more easily occur in that area, Bickel added.

This process is similar to how high winds can pick up Martian dust and trigger sizable tornadoes, or "dust devils," on the Red Planet's wide-open plains.

The reason it has taken scientists so long to solve this puzzle is likely because it all happens under the cover of darkness. "The conditions most conducive to seasonal streak formation appear to occur at sunrise and sunset, explaining the lack of direct observations of streak-forming events to date," Bickel wrote in the study.

The study also revealed that slope streak formation likely occurs at an annual rate of around 0.05 new streaks per existing streak. Given that there are estimated to be 1.6 million slope streaks, that means the current rate of formation is around 80,000 new streaks per year. Most streaks likely last for several decades before disappearing, but there is not enough orbiter data to tell for sure.

While slope streaks cover less than 0.1% of Mars' surface, the new study suggests that they may be the largest single contributor to atmospheric dust. Therefore, better understanding the streaks' role in the Martian dust cycle, which could impact future human colonies on Mars, should be a key goal for future Mars missions.

"These observations could lead to a better understanding of what happens on Mars today," Colin Wilson, the European Space Agency's project scientist for the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, who was not involved in the new study, said in the statement. "Obtaining long-term, continuous and global-scale observations that reveal a dynamic Mars is a key objective of present and future orbiters."

UPDATE: Earlier Blue Origin posted on X that the launch has been rescheduled for this afternoon (Nov. 13), with a launch window between 2:57 p.m. to 4:25 p.m. EST. Be sure to check the live blog for the latest.

While people around the world are getting auroral treats from an active sun, the recent solar activity has caused disappointment for Mars-mission fans. Due to the adverse space weather, they will now have to wait to see two Red Planet-bound spacecraft launch aboard a Blue Origin rocket.

NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft were supposed to fly to Mars as soon as this afternoon (Nov. 12), but strong solar activity means the mission will have to wait until an indeterminate date, Blue Origin officials said in a post on the social platform X. The mission has already been delayed several times from an expected October 2024 liftoff date due to technical and scheduling issues, and a recent launch attempt on Nov. 9 was stood down due to the weather on Earth.

"Due to highly elevated solar activity and its potential effects on the ESCAPADE spacecraft, NASA is postponing launch until space weather conditions improve," Blue Origin officials wrote. "We are currently assessing opportunities to establish our next launch window based on forecasted space weather and range availability."

ESCAPADE — short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — is a mission managed by NASA that uses two spacecraft built by California-based aerospace company Rocket Lab. The spacecraft will fly aboard the 321-foot-tall (98 meters) Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which is designed for orbital and interplanetary missions like this Mars effort.

Ironically, ESCAPADE is designed to study the very same space weather that is delaying it. The sun has an 11-year cycle of solar activity and is at the peak in 2025. As the sun releases large, fast-moving clouds of plasma known as coronal mass ejections, this electrically charged material triggers auroras when the particles interact with Earth's magnetic field lines and atmosphere. Severe solar storms can also affect satellites and power lines, which is why NASA and other groups are eager to keep an eye on the sky.

ESCAPADE will examine how this space weather as well as solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles the sun sends through the solar system — previously stripped Mars of the thicker atmosphere the Red Planet had in its ancient past. Scientists believe that as the atmosphere thinned, flowing water on the surface dried up, leaving Mars as a largely desert world aside from ice at the poles and suspected reserves of water underground.

The nearly $80 million ESCAPADE isn't the only payload aboard New Glenn. Within the rocket's second stage is a telemetry communications experiment for Viasat flying on behalf of NASA's Communications Services Project, Blue Origin officials said in a report from Live Science’s sister website Space.com.

New Glenn has only been used in one mission so far — during the NG-1 mission in January. Its first stage is designed to land on a barge in the ocean so it can be reused. However, during the January mission, it failed to land on its barge and was lost.

Blue Origin also eventually plans to use New Glenn for moon exploration, bringing both humans and scientific equipment to the lunar surface aboard its yet-to-be flown Blue Moon lander.

Rival aerospace company SpaceX is, for now, tasked with the first human landing of NASA's Artemis moon program, which may happen aboard the company’s Starship as soon as 2027. But delays in Starship's development recently prompted acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy to suggest he may reopen the Artemis 3 contract to Blue Origin and other companies.

This striking satellite photo shows a barren Mars-like volcano lurking in the heart of the Costa Rican rainforest. The alien landscape contains a super-acidic lake that is a "paradise" for extreme microbes and provides researchers with an excellent analog for studying potential lifeforms on the Red Planet.

The unique volcano, named Poás, is the focal point of the Poás Volcano National Park in Costa Rica's Alajuela province. It is a stratovolcano that formed between 1.5 million and 700,000 years ago, with a summit that reaches 8,848 feet (2,697 meters) above sea level.

Satellite images make it look like Poás is situated in the middle of nowhere. However, around 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of the volcano (just out of shot in this photo), lie the suburbs of Costa Rica's capital San José, which is home to around 1.5 million people. As a result, the volcano is a popular tourist destination, despite being one of the most active volcanoes in Central America.

Poás has had dozens of major eruptions in the last 200 years, but also experiences many more smaller outbursts, where it puffs out a mix of steam, smoke and toxic gases, as well as the occasional ash cloud. Since 2005, the volcano has had 13 of these minor eruptive phases, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

Its most recent eruption began on Jan. 5 and persisted for the majority of 2025, although it has likely now come to an end. This phase's activity peaked in early May, when sulfur dioxide levels briefly impacted air quality in San José and ashfall damaged some nearby crops, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The main crater of Poás contains a highly acidic volcanic lake, named Laguna Caliente, which has an average pH value of just over 0, which is roughly equivalent to battery acid, according to the Earth Observatory. This crater, which is around 0.8 miles (1.3 km) wide, is also home to sporadic geysers.

While these extreme conditions mean no animals or plants live within the crater, the lake's acidic waters are home to a thriving microbial community dominated by extremophile bacteria in the genus Acidiphilium, which feast on metal compounds dissolved in the water.

"We have a very human-centric bias for what a nice, happy, temperate environment is to grow in," Rachel Harris, a microbial ecologist and geochemist at Harvard University who is currently involved in devising NASA's Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy, told the Earth Observatory. "The Poás system may be hostile to most forms of life we are familiar with. But for a microbe adapted to acid, heat and toxic metals, it's paradise," Earth Observatory representatives added.

Researchers are interested in Poás' extreme ecosystem because it is very similar to volcanic environments that likely existed on Mars more than 3 billion years ago, when the Red Planet was more similar to our own.

A 2022 study, for example, revealed that the low biodiversity and high resilience within Laguna Caliente's microbial community is very close to what researchers expect could have developed within potential Martian ecosystems.

Poás is particularly similar to a region of Mars, known as Home Plate, which was surveyed by NASA's Spirit rover in 2009. This 300-foot-wide (90 m) plateau likely had an acidic hydrothermal system that may have been almost identical to Laguna Caliente, according to the Earth Observatory.

Other types of extremophiles may also have once thrived on Mars, including lifeforms similar to lichens or photosynthetic algae. However, despite some promising recent findings from NASA's Perseverance rover, there is no hard evidence that the Red Planet has ever supported alien life.

Two spacecraft on Mars have captured new images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in the closest view that the European Space Agency (ESA) will get of the mysterious object, according to an ESA statement.

The comet, which came from an unknown star system far beyond our own, is currently taking a months-long tour of the inner solar system. It made its closest approach to Mars Friday (Oct. 3) ahead of a close encounter with the sun on Oct. 30. During its recent flyby of the Red Planet, the comet came within view of ESA and NASA's fleet of robotic explorers, including ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Mars Express orbiter.

Soaring 18.6 million miles (30 million kilometers) overhead, the comet proved too dim for Mars Express to capture. However, the ExoMars TGO satellite succeeded in snapping a series of images, which ESA combined into an animated GIF. The animation shows the comet — visible as a fuzzy, bright dot — descending toward the center of the frame as it zooms away from Mars at an estimated 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h).

What can we see?

The bright dot represents the comet's nucleus (the ball of icy rock that makes up the body of the comet) and its coma (the nebulous cloud of gas that streams off the nucleus as it heats up). As comets swoop closer to the sun, ice on their surfaces sublimates into gas, causing the coma to grow larger and brighter, according to NASA. Pressure from incoming solar wind can also blow the coma's gas and dust away from the sun, giving comets their distinctive tails.

Because TGO was designed to monitor the Martian surface from just a few hundred miles away, its instruments aren't the best at recording faraway, fast-moving objects like 3I/ATLAS, ESA officials noted.

"The comet is around 10,000 to 100,000 times fainter than our usual target," Nick Thomas, principal investigator for ExoMars' Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System, said in the statement. As a result, no tail is visible in the new images. But that doesn't mean the comet doesn't have one; as 3I/ATLAS careens closer to the sun, both its coma and its tail are likely to grow and brighten, ESA officials added.

At the moment, the new images don't reveal any new insights about the peculiar object, but ESA will continue to analyze images from both of its Mars satellites in hopes of teasing out some new data on the comet's possible size and composition.

It remains uncertain whether any of NASA's dedicated Mars rovers or satellites also spotted the comet during its close approach, as the agency has paused all public communications during the ongoing U.S. government shutdown. However, a raw image captured by the Perseverance rover's Right Navigation Camera on Oct. 4 shows a bright, streaking object in the sky that may be Comet 3I/ATLAS, according to Live Science’s sister site Space.com. No official information about the image has been released.

3I/ATLAS is the third interstellar object ever confirmed — after 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov — and appears to be the largest so far, with estimates placing it somewhere between 3 and 7 miles (5 to 11 km) wide. Its speed and trajectory suggest that it has been zooming through the galaxy for billions of years and is likely far older than the sun.

The comet is currently traveling on the far side of the sun, out of Earth's view, but it will become visible to ground-based telescopes again in early December. The comet will whiz past Jupiter in March 2026, before heading out of our solar system forever.

If you've ever wanted to get lost on Mars, now's your chance: You can fly over a maze-like canyon on the Red Planet in a stunning new video from the European Space Agency (ESA).

The animation, based on data from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, brings viewers on a "mesmerising flight over curving channels carved by water, islands that have resisted erosion, and a maze of hilly terrain," using images from the spacecraft's high-resolution stereo camera, ESA officials said in a statement.

"Central to the tour is a 1300 km [808-mile]-long outflow channel called Shalbatana Vallis," they explained. "It cascades down from the highland region of Xanthe Terra to the smoother lowlands of Chryse Planitia. Billions of years ago, water surged through this channel, creating many of the features we see today. The tour culminates in a spectacular view of a 100 km [62-mile]-wide impact crater, smashed out of Mars's surface when it collided with a space rock."

Xanthe Terra was the name the International Astronomical Union gave to this region in 1979, following high-resolution mapping of Mars by spacecraft of that era. The name means something like "golden-yellow land," according to DLR, the German space agency, which funded the camera equipment.

Keen-eyed video viewers will see the flight cross the "Martian dichotomy boundary," where the craters of the southern highlands gradually smooth into flatter plains in the northern lowlands, DLR stated in a separate statement. Researchers are still not sure why this dichotomy exists.

The video also features outflow channels that "are wide, deeply incised valley structures that likely formed in Mars' geological past during catastrophic flood events involving enormous quantities of water," DLR officials said. This carving may have happened as volcanoes melted underground ice deposits.

The Mars Express camera scours Mars' geology as part of the larger mission's search for life, DLR officials added the statement.

Mars Express has been at the Red Planet since 2003, for what was supposed to be a two-year mission. The spacecraft is still healthy after more than 20 years of service, and it has received multiple mission extensions based on its scientific return.

"While it may be feeling its age, it continues to lift the lid on the Red Planet, with implications for our understanding of our own home," ESA officials wrote of the long-running mission in 2023.

What if the first Martian rock samples ever deliberately hauled back to Earth landed not in Houston, but in Beijing?

That scenario, once far-fetched, is edging closer to reality. The U.S.-led Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission — long flagged as a top priority in planetary science and designed as the capstone to the Perseverance rover's carefully-curated cache of geological samples scooped from Mars' Jezero Crater — has stalled.

Initially targeted for the early 2030s, the program has become over-complicated, over-budget and increasingly vulnerable to political headwinds. Meanwhile, at least 30 sealed sample tubes, which may contain the first hard evidence of extraterrestrial life, lie stranded in the Martian dust.

At the same time, China's Tianwen-3 mission, designed as a leaner effort aiming to collect fewer, less carefully chosen samples, is on track for launch in 2028 with a planned return to Earth in 2031. If successful, Beijing would secure one of the most coveted prizes in planetary science years, if not decades, ahead of NASA. With China's launch window fast approaching, experts say NASA may have already lost its chance to pull ahead.

"I don't think it's a competition anyway, because we already know enough about MSR's problems and their budget issues," Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who is not directly involved with either country's sample return program, told Live Science. NASA's mission is already far enough along, with samples cached on Mars and major hardware designed or built, that a pivot now to a nimbler, cheaper alternative that still meets the original mission timeframe is "simply not possible," he said. "They're stuck with the plan they have."

The scientific payoff is immense. Returning Martian samples would allow laboratories on Earth to conduct analyses that are impossible with rover-based instruments, such as probing rocks at atomic and molecular scales, searching for organic compounds, and even scanning for fossilized microbes.

Such work could finally prove whether Mars once hosted life — or confirm that it has always been barren. Either result would revolutionize planetary science. But as with so many firsts in space, science is only part of the story.

"There is undoubtedly a certain degree of geopolitical value in being first, and the value in that regard comes from the public perception of being first or not," Gerard van Belle, the director of science at Lowell Observatory in Arizona who is not directly involved in either country’s sample return mission, told Live Science. "The idea that maybe one mission will be better in terms of its results will probably get lost in the mix — and that's a pity."

Can NASA catch up?

Since 2020, NASA's Perseverance rover has been drilling and caching dozens of samples in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed where it recently uncovered what the agency has called the "clearest sign of life we've ever found on Mars." Such carefully curated rocks, scientists argue, represent humanity's best chance yet to determine whether the Red Planet was ever home to life.

But getting them home is proving elusive. The U.S.-led MSR, a joint project with the European Space Agency, was conceived as a high-stakes chain of complex handoffs: Perseverance's cache would be fetched by a lander, transferred by robotic arm into a Mars Ascent Vehicle, and then launched into orbit for capture by a return spacecraft.

Even after plans for a "fetch rover" were later dropped in favor of a pair of miniature helicopters, the choreography remained astronomically expensive. With costs swelling past $11 billion and timelines sliding toward 2040, NASA declared the plan untenable in 2024.

"Maybe if the U.S. had to rethink it, they might have cast a slightly different path, where they might have gone with a simpler mission first — maybe," said van Belle.

Earlier this year, NASA outlined two scaled-back alternatives. Either would require an immediate $300 million commitment from Congress to stay on track, with a launch around 2030 and the return of about 30 Martian samples between 2035 and 2039.

Even so, Impey doubts NASA can regain lost ground. "I don't think they can accelerate the timeline, even if they got the money they are asking for currently," he said.

China's Tianwen-3, by contrast, is betting on a self-contained mission whose playbook was proven effective by its recent moon missions, which returned lunar samples with Chang'e-5 in 2020 and Chang'e-6 in 2024 — the latter gathering the first samples ever scooped from the moon's unexplored far side.

Tianwen-3 calls for two launches: one carrying a lander equipped with a drill, robotic arm and helicopter scout, and the other carrying an orbiter-returner spacecraft. Using a "grab-and-go" approach, the lander would collect samples and load them directly into its ascent vehicle. After about two months on the surface, that rocket-powered stage would launch to meet the orbiter-returner in Mars orbit, which would then ferry about 1 pound (500 grams) of material back to Earth.

The Chinese mission plans to target a flatter, less geologically diverse landing site than Jezero, chosen for safety rather than scientific promise. That means the samples may be less revealing than Perseverance's cache. Still, Tianwen-3 is more likely to stay on schedule, as it is embedded in China's long-term space strategy — one that is healthily funded and has already returned lunar samples, built a space station, and set goals for a permanent moon base by 2035 and crewed missions to Mars by 2050.

"[China's] timelines are a few decades, but the timelines for NASA are almost dissolving as we watch," Impey said. "So, if there is a space race, China's already winning it, and could win it dramatically in the next few decades."

A new Sputnik moment?

NASA's obstacles are not purely technical. The White House has proposed steep cuts — nearly halving NASA's science budget and slashing its overall funding by 24%, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. If enacted, it would mark the steepest single-year cut in NASA’s history, even deeper than the reductions after the Apollo program wound down in the 1970s.

The coming fiscal year will be decisive, Impey said. If the cuts are enacted, they will not only jeopardize MSR but also trigger broader reductions across active observatories and planetary probes.

"That would be devastating," said Impey. "That's a cliff that they could fall off — and if they fall off that cliff, then the U.S.-led MSR effort is certainly not going to happen for decades."

If China returns Mars samples first, the symbolism would potentially echo a new Sputnik moment. In 1957, the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite stunned the U.S., spurred the creation of NASA, drove massive investment in science and engineering education, and ultimately accelerated the space race that culminated in the Apollo moon landings a decade later.

Planetary scientists eager to know about Mars' past habitability emphasize that they want to see the U.S.-led Mars Sample Return mission succeed, even if it has to be delayed, rather than see the plug pulled entirely.

"What's important is, can you answer the question of whether there was or is life on Mars?" said Impey.

But no single mission is guaranteed to settle that question, he cautioned. Each will return only a small cache of rocks from a single region of a vast, complex planet. That makes it all the more critical that both NASA and China succeed in their sample return plans, since together their efforts could offer complementary pieces of the puzzle.

"If you brought back the perfect rock, yes, you could get lucky," Impey added. "There is still a chance that a single shot sample return from one location just won't answer the question."

Who hasn't looked into the sky and wondered if there's life out there, somewhere, looking back at us? Is it possible there's alien life closer to home — within the bounds of our solar system?

The short answer is yes, there are several places researchers are looking for signs of life within our solar system, and there are some hints that life might be hiding in unexpected places.

Is there life on Mars?

While there don't seem to be any "little green men" inhabiting Mars, it's possible there was microbial life in the past. Mars is currently a frigid desert, but thanks to Mars rovers that have studied the planet's rocks, we know that a long time ago, it had liquid water — an important condition for life.

"The Curiosity rover was built to search for habitable environments, the kind that could have supported microbial life on Mars in the past, if life ever arose on the Red Planet," said Amy Williams, a geology professor at the University of Florida and a member of both NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance science teams. "Curiosity's payload was selected to accomplish this task by looking for the conditions that we know life on Earth requires — liquid water, a source of carbon, and chemical energy to power a metabolism," she told Live Science.

In addition to studying the Martian environment, the Perseverance rover has been collecting promising rock samples to be returned to Earth for advanced analysis. The Mars Sample Return mission is currently under development by NASA and ESA to travel to Mars, collect the sample cores, and bring them back to Earth. (The Donald Trump administration has proposed cutting NASA funding to pay for this mission, however.)

"At least one of the cores collected has qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient microbial life," Williams said of a particularly interesting rock sample. "Returning samples to Earth with the Mars Sample Return architecture would enable us to address some of humanity's most profound questions, including whether we are alone in the universe."

Related: How would we give aliens directions to Earth?

Could there be life on Venus?

Even though it's commonly called Earth's "twin," Venus is probably not the first place anyone might look for life in the solar system. Its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, and the average surface pressure is more than 90 times that of Earth. It's wrapped in thick, dense clouds that are mostly made from sulfuric acid, a highly corrosive substance that mixes with water to form acid rain on Earth, damaging flora, fauna and soil.

Despite those hostile conditions, extremophile microbial life might be able to survive high in Venus' atmosphere, where the temperatures and pressures aren't so extreme; perhaps life could find ways to protect itself from sulfuric acid's destructive nature. To find out, MIT is putting together the Morning Star Missions, which will travel to Venus' atmosphere with the ultimate goal of collecting a sample of the planet's clouds and returning it to Earth for better analysis.

"Microbial life might exist in Venus's clouds, despite their composition of concentrated sulfuric acid," Sara Seager, a professor at MIT and the director of the Morning Star Missions, told Live Science. "If we find compelling signs of life on Venus, it would upend our understanding of habitability and prove that life can exist in non-water solvents, opening up the range of worlds where life is possible."

When looking for life, scientists often focus on the search for liquid water because it's a requirement for life on Earth. Finding life on Venus would shatter that limitation — meaning alien life could be a lot stranger than we've thought and there could be a lot more places to look for it.

In 2020, a possible detection of phosphine gas in Venus' clouds became the center of a controversy about signs of life on Venus. Phosphine gas was an unexpected find because most known chemical processes that produce it come from living organisms or from extreme pressures on gas giants. However, the signal was small and critics said it might have been noise in the data. The Morning Star Missions to Venus will give us much more information about the planet's chemistry and possibly confirm if there's phosphine floating in the clouds.

Is there life on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter?

Further out in the solar system, there are several moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter that could potentially host life, particularly Enceladus and Europa.

Saturn's moon Enceladus has a global subsurface ocean hiding underneath a thick icy shell. The moon constantly spits giant plumes of salty water into space that give scientists a rare opportunity to directly sample the interior of a celestial body other than Earth. The Cassini mission performed several flybys of Enceladus from 2005 through 2017, collecting images and even direct samples from the plumes that are still being analyzed. A 2023 paper in Nature announced that scientists had detected phosphates on Enceladus — meaning scientists have now detected all the basic chemical ingredients for life in the moon's ocean.

Several missions to study astrobiology on Enceladus, with the goal of collecting more samples from the plumes, have been in the works by teams at ESA and NASA, although they're still a long way from getting to the launch pad.

Like Enceladus, Jupiter's moon Europa is an icy world with a global subsurface ocean and water plumes erupting from its surface. Jupiter's massive gravitational pull on the moon provides energy and motion that fuels active geologic activity, and is thought to be the main reason the ocean is warm enough to be liquid. Interactions between the salty ocean and the rocky interior could possibly host life similar to the life found around hydrothermal vents on Earth.

ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) launched on April 14, 2023 with an expected arrival at Jupiter in July 2031, where it will study Jupiter and three of its moons: Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. NASA's Europa Clipper mission launched on Oct. 14, 2024 to reach Jupiter in 2030 and conduct flybys of Europa to study if conditions for life are present.

Titan, another of Saturn's moons, is an extremely unique place in the solar system. It has a methane cycle like Earth's water cycle and a thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere. The Cassini mission performed over 50 flybys of Titan from 2004 through 2017 and launched the Huygens probe that landed on the moon's surface in 2005. These two missions collected data that indicated Titan's atmosphere could probably create complex molecules that are building blocks for life. NASA is putting together a car-sized octocopter to fly on Titan and collect samples at different landing sites.

Where else could life be in the solar system?

There are quite a few other places we might find life in the solar system, including dwarf planets like Ceres. Ceres is thought to have a lot of liquid water under an icy and rocky crust, thanks to images taken by NASA's Dawn mission which visited it in 2015.

The more we explore the solar system, the more places we find that have conditions that could support life. If there is life out there, it's likely not advanced enough to reach out to us, so we'll have to be the first to say hello.

Extraterrestrials quiz: Are you an alien expert, or has your brain been abducted?

Strange nodules of unusual minerals found on speckled rocks on Mars have offered more tantalizing clues that ancient life may have once thrived on the now-dead planet, NASA says.

NASA's Perseverance rover found one such arrow-shaped rock, nicknamed Cheyava Falls, in 2024 along the northern bank of Neretva Vallis, the dried-up remnants of an ancient river that once rushed into Mars' Jezero crater.

An initial analysis of the rock, which appeared in a lake bed formation known as Bright Angel, revealed it was crammed with organic compounds, had evidence that water once flowed through it, and contained flecks of leopard-like spots from chemical reactions that ancient microbes could have used for energy.

These features may result from non-biological processes occurring over millions of years. But now, in a new study published Sept. 10 in the journal Nature, NASA scientists have announced intriguing details about additional rock samples found at two nearby sites — and they say these clues bolster the case for past life on Mars.

"After a year of review, they have come back and they said, listen, we can't find another explanation," Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, said during a news briefing following the announcement. "So this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting."

Since arriving on Mars in 2021, Perseverance has been trundling across the 30-mile-wide (50 kilometers) Jezero crater, collecting dozens of rock samples for eventual return to Earth. Upon finding the leopard-spotted rock, scans by the rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument showed that the specimen contained carbon-based molecules, alongside bands of reddish hematite that featured spots of iron and phosphate.

Related: Scientists find hint of hidden liquid water ocean deep below Mars' surface

"When the rover entered Bright Angel and started measuring the compositions of the local rocks, the team was immediately struck by how different they were from what we had seen before," study co-author Michael Tice, a geobiologist and astrobiologist at Texas A&M University, said in a statement. "They showed evidence of chemical cycling that organisms on Earth can take advantage of to produce energy. And when we looked even closer, we saw things that are easy to explain with early Martian life but very difficult to explain with only geological processes."

The additional discoveries announced by NASA today relate to clay-rich rock samples found at two sites, named Sapphire Canyon and Masonic Temple, containing vivianite, an iron-phosphate mineral, and greigite, a mineral containing iron sulfide.

These minerals may have formed from reactions between the mud and organic matter, according to the scientists. The minerals' distribution across the rocks appears to support this hypothesis.

"It's not just the minerals, it's how they are arranged in these structures that suggests that they formed through the redox cycling [in which bacteria are key players on Earth] of iron and sulfur," Tice said. "On Earth, things like these sometimes form in sediments where microbes are eating organic matter and 'breathing' rust and sulfate. Their presence on Mars raises the question: could similar processes have occurred there?"

Nonetheless, a definitive ruling over the biological or non-biological processes that created the patterns can only be made in labs on Earth, and whether Perseverence's precious cargo will be fetched for that analysis remains a contentious political question.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA originally proposed the use of NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander — a spacecraft carrying a small rocket — to collect the rover's samples by 2033 as a part of their Mars Sample Return mission. The rocket would then launch back into orbit with the samples.

But the mission, now significantly over budget and delayed, is facing cancellation from the Trump administration's planned budget cuts to NASA. Meanwhile, China has revealed its own plans for a Mars sample-return mission that could launch by 2028.

When pressed by reporters during a Q&A session following the announcement, Duffy was unable to confirm if or when the sample-return mission would happen, but he remained optimistic.

"The president loves space — he asked me about it," Duffy said. "I give him updates, how it's going, what we're doing, and he doesn't brush me off."

"If there was an issue with resources, I would go to him and I'm sure he would support us," he added.

NASA's Perseverance rover has snapped an intriguing photo of a "turtle" appearing to poke its head out of its shell on the surface of Mars. The reptile-like structure is the latest in a long list of Martian rocks that look similar to living creatures or other Earth objects.

Perseverance captured the new image on Aug. 31, on what was its 1,610th Sol, or Martian day, on the Red Planet. The wandering, car-sized robot snapped the shot somewhere in the Jezero Crater — a 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) depression where the rover touched down in 2021, which is thought to have previously contained a large lake.

The photo was taken using the rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) and Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) instruments, which combined to scan the rock in visible and ultraviolet wavelengths of light, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. Both instruments are mounted on the rover's robotic-arm turret.

The featured rock has garnered comparisons to a turtle, thanks to a head with two eyes that look as if it has protruded from a protective "shell" with a pair of "front legs" on either side (see image below).

It is currently unclear which geological processes have shaped the rock into this unusual shape.

Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

The Mars rovers have collectively captured tens of thousands of photos of Mars' surface, most of which feature multiple different rocks or other geological features that have been sculpted into unique shapes by ancient water sources or millenia of strong winds. Every once in a while, one of these rocks bears a resemblance to something we can see on Earth, such as blueberries, human-like fingerprints, a mysterious doorway and even a "Star Trek" symbol, to name a few.

These associations are often made due to pareidolia — a psychological phenomenon where the human mind perceives a familiar pattern, such as a face or image, in random objects or structures, such as clouds.

Perseverance has been particularly good at spotting these weird rocks during its five-year mission. Its other recent finds include a bizarre medieval "helmet" that it wheeled past in August and an out-of-place "skull" that is snapped in April.

The Martian turtle is not the only "animal" to be spotted on the Red Planet. In recent years, Mars-orbiting spacecraft have also spotted larger geological features with a zoological appearance, including a Dog-shaped blob beneath the planet's North Pole, a grinning cartoon-like teddy bear and seasonal swarms of "spiders" crawling across the Martian surface.

Giant impact structures, including the potential remains of ancient "protoplanets," may be lurking deep beneath the surface of Mars, new research hints. The mysterious lumps, which have been perfectly preserved within the Red Planet's immobile innards for billions of years, may date back to the beginning of the solar system.

In a new study, published Aug. 28 in the journal Science, researchers analyzed "Marsquake" data collected by NASA's InSight lander, which monitored tremors beneath the Martian surface from 2018 until 2022, when it met an untimely demise from dust blocking its solar panels. By looking at how these Marsquakes vibrated through the Red Planet's unmoving mantle, the team discovered several never-before-seen blobs that were much denser than the surrounding material.

The researchers have identified dozens of potential structures, measuring up to 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) across, at various depths within Mars' mantle, which is made of 960 miles (1,550 km) of solid rock that can reach temperatures as high as 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius).

"We've never seen the inside of a planet in such fine detail and clarity before," study lead author Constantinos Charalambous, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London, said in a NASA statement. "What we're seeing is a mantle studded with ancient fragments."

Based on the hidden objects' size and depth, the researchers think the structures were made when objects slammed into Mars up to 4.5 billion years ago, during the early days of the solar system. Some of the objects were likely protoplanets — giant rocks that were capable of growing into full-size planets if they had remained undisturbed, the researchers wrote.

Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

The researchers first noticed the buried structures when they found that some of the Marsquake signals took longer to pass through parts of the mantle than others. By tracing back these signals, they identified regions with higher densities than the surrounding rock, suggesting that those sections did not originate there.

Mars is a single-plate planet, meaning that its crust remains fully intact, unlike Earth's, which is divided into tectonic plates. As pieces of Earth's crust subduct through plate boundaries, they sink into the mantle, which causes the molten rock within our planet to rise and fall via convection. But on Mars, this does not happen, which means its mantle is fixed in place and does not fully melt.

The newly discovered blobs are further proof that Mars' interior is much less active than Earth's.

"Their survival to this day tells us Mars' mantle has evolved sluggishly over billions of years," Charalambous said. "On Earth, features like these may well have been largely erased."

Because Mars has no tectonic activity, Marsquakes are instead triggered by landslides, cracking rocks or meteoroid impacts, which frequently pepper the planet's surface. These tremors have also been used to detect other hidden objects beneath the Red Planet's surface, including a giant underground ocean discovered using InSight data last year.

In total, InSight captured data on 1,319 Marsquakes during its roughly four-year-long mission. However, scientists were still surprised that they could map the planet's insides in such great detail.

"We knew Mars was a time capsule bearing records of its early formation, but we didn't anticipate just how clearly we'd be able to see with InSight," study co-author Tom Pike, a space exploration engineer at Imperial College London, said in the statement.

SpaceX's Starship has finally pulled off a successful test flight in a stunning reversal of fortunes for Elon Musk's most ambitious rocket.

The uncrewed 403-foot-tall (123 meters) rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas, at 7:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday (Aug. 26).

Starship completed a nerve-wracking, hour-long flight, reaching a maximum altitude of 124 miles (200 kilometers) above Earth's surface, before its upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Earlier, after separation, the rocket's Super Heavy booster landed in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ecstatic applause erupted as SpaceX's engineering teams celebrated the rocket completing its journey. Unlike previous attempts, Starship was finally able to use its satellite deployment system to drop mock Starlink satellites into space for the first time.

Much more was riding on this 10th test launch than dummy satellites. The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth — and eventually to the moon and Mars. SpaceX has a $2.9 billion contract with NASA to carry astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2027.

The latest test flight, coming two days later than planned due to issues with Starbase's ground systems and bad weather, marks a comeback for the company after a string of failures.

Starship's ninth launch fell short of its target, while its eighth and seventh launches ended in dramatic explosions that hurled fiery debris across the Caribbean. In June, a Starship rocket also exploded on the launch pad while preparing for a flight. Last year, scientists revealed that a previous explosion, during the second test flight in November 2023, temporarily ripped a "hole" in the atmosphere.

"Congratulations to @SpaceX on its Starship test. Flight 10's success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III," NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy wrote on X following the flight. "This is a great day for @NASA and our commercial space partners."

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

Yesterday's mission was intended as a test for the ship's new heat shield tiles and its ability to deploy payloads in orbit, alongside many other upgrades to improve on previous flights. It was also a demonstration of SpaceX's "fail fast, learn fast" mantra, where test rockets are flown beyond their technical limits — the company treats failures as opportunities to gather more data.

Despite the 10th launch's success, signs of stress on the rocket were evident during flight, with the rocket's flaps catching on fire and swinging back and forth.

The rocket's hexagonal heat shield tiles were also licked by fire during the rocket's blazing-hot supersonic reentry. They were developed as a fully reusable orbital heat shield, a historical departure from traditional shields that take refurbishment after each flight. For example, NASA's retired Space Shuttle took nine months to refurnish its heat shields between flights, Musk noted during a webcast on Monday (Aug. 25.)

"What we're trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately," he said.

The speed of the rocket's development is driven by SpaceX's NASA contract, which will see a modified version of the craft take humans to the moon as part of its Artemis programme in 2027. Musk has also suggested that the rocket could start uncrewed test flights to Mars in the next 12 months.

Yet remaining technical challenges could force these key dates to slip. SpaceX still needs to demonstrate that the rocket can be refueled in orbit, a key test before it can carry out missions further into space.

NASA's Perseverance rover has stumbled across a curious, volcano-shaped rock on the surface of Mars that looks rather like a weathered battle helmet.

Captured by the rover's Mastcam-Z instrument on Aug. 5, 2025, the rock displays a pointed peak and pitted nodular texture that evokes an image of armor forged centuries ago. On Earth, similar nodule textures can form through chemical weathering, mineral precipitation or even volcanic processes. Perseverance found a similar rock in March 2025.

And it's these spherules that have scientists intrigued. "This hat-shaped rock is composed of spherules. This rock's target name is Horneflya and it's distinctive less because of its hat shape (which looks to me to be generally consistent with the pyramid shape we often see in of wind-eroded float blocks on the surface of Mars) and more because it's made almost entirely of spherules," David Agle, a spokesperson for the Perseverance team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com.

Scientists think that in some rocks seen on Mars, these spherules form when groundwater passed through pores in sedimentary rocks. But they're not sure if all of them formed this way; Perseverance's science team will have its work cut out for it analyzing more rocks to search for answers to this Martian geology mystery and other burning Red Planet questions.

The Mastcam-Z instrument, a pair of zoom-capable cameras on Perseverance's neck-like mast, allows scientists to capture high-resolution stereo images and spot unusual features like this spherule-covered "helmet" rock from a distance.

Perseverance has uncovered a growing gallery of odd rock shapes, from donut-like meteorites to avocado-like stones. These types of images are examples of a phenomenon known as pareidolia, which describes the human brain's tendency to impose a familiar pattern on otherwise random visual data — whether that's a face in the clouds, a rabbit in the moon, or a medieval helmet on the Martian surface.

For now, the helmet rock remains a compelling snapshot of Martian history. Features like this help scientists piece together the Red Planet's environmental history, showing how wind, water and internal processes may have sculpted the landscape over billions of years.

Perseverance is currently exploring the northern rim of the Jezero Crater, having successfully completed a challenging ascent to the crest known as "Lookout Hill" late last year.

Mars has a huge network of canyons that stretches about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) across its equator. This canyon system, called Valles Marineris, is the largest in the solar system, dwarfing Earth's largest canyon, which covers 460 miles (750 km) under Greenland's ice sheet. (Condolences to the Grand Canyon and its mere 277-mile length.)

First imaged by NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft in 1972, Valles Marineris has been captured by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter many times in its 19 years in orbit. However, this geological wonder still holds many secrets.

This latest photo, taken May 24 and published last week, is of the eastern side of Candor Chasma, one of the largest canyons within Valles Marineris. What it reveals could change how planetary geologists think about Mars' ancient environment.

Using its ability to see detail down to the size of a kitchen table, HiRISE produced an image that shows layered deposits of sediment several meters thick, scientists at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, which developed and operates the camera, said in a description of the image. Crucially, these layers of sediment must date to after the canyon itself formed, because they appear to have been eroded, warped and bent by tectonic movements.

Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

Mars doesn't have plate tectonics like Earth does. Instead, its crust is like one giant plate, according to NASA. But faults and fractures still form in the Martian crust as it cools. Unlike Earth's Grand Canyon, which was carved by a river, Valles Marineris — including Candor Chasma — is thought to have formed by volcanic activity, with landslides, floods and erosion later sculpting it into its present form.

In 2021, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed that the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a collaboration between ESA and the Russian space agency, had found water beneath the surface in Candor Chasma. It's thought that up to 40% of the near-surface material in Valles Marineris could be water. That would make it akin to Earth's permafrost regions in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.

With its steep walls and chaotic landscapes, Candor Chasma would be challenging for a Mars rover to explore. However, the German Space Agency's Valles Marineris Exploration project would study the possibility of sending a swarm of autonomous rovers, crawlers and uncrewed aerial vehicles to this treacherous terrain.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

A space rock that punched a hole through a Georgia resident's home earlier this summer may be 20 million years older than our planet, researchers say.

The meteorite streaked across the sky as a fireball on June 26, just before a piece of it struck a house in the city of McDonough. A researcher at the University of Georgia (UGA) studied material recovered from the house and found that the meteorite formed around 4.56 billion years ago — making it about 20 million years older than Earth.

"This particular meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it made it to the ground of McDonough," Scott Harris, a researcher in the geology department at UGA, said in a statement.

Harris' analysis revealed that the newly named McDonough meteorite came from beyond Mars and is linked to a much larger asteroid that broke up around half a billion years ago.

"It belongs to a group of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we now think we can tie to a breakup of a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago," Harris said. "But in that breakup, some pieces get into Earth-crossing orbits, and if given long enough, their orbit around the sun and Earth’s orbit around the sun end up being at the same place, at the same moment in time."

Related: Perseid meteor shower 2025: How to see 'shooting stars' despite the full moon

The McDonough meteorite made quite an entrance on June 26. NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office estimated that the 3-foot-wide (1 meter) object was travelling at 29,000 mph (47,000 km/h), while the American Meteor Society received more than 240 sighting reports of a fireball across the Southeast. Many people also heard and felt a sonic boom, which some mistook for an earthquake, the Smithsonian Magazine reported shortly after the event.

The meteorite slowed down a lot as it traveled through our atmosphere and broke apart as it got closer to the ground, but it was still moving fast enough to cause damage on impact.

"When they [meteorites] encounter Earth, our atmosphere is very good at slowing them down," Harris said. "But you're talking about something that is double the size of a 50-caliber shell, going at least 1 kilometer per second [0.6 miles per second]. That's like running 10 football fields in one second."

When part of the meteorite hit the house in McDonough, it went straight through the roof, ceiling, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) duct. It left a dent in the living room floor and made a noise and vibration that sounded like a close-range gunshot, according to the statement. The piece of rock was pulverized into fragments on impact, scattering space dust around the room that the resident of the house is still finding today.

Harris used optical and electron microscopy to analyze 0.8 ounces (23 grams) of rock fragments recovered from the house. Based on this analysis, he believes that the meteorite is a stony meteorite (chondrite) that's low in metal content, according to the statement.

Researchers will continue to analyze the rock fragments at UGA, while some additional pieces that landed in the area will go on display at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville.

Meteorites are relatively rare in Georgia; this is only the 27th documented in the state's history and the sixth to have been witnessed falling, according to the statement. However, Harris noted that they are now being recorded more frequently.

"This is something that used to be expected once every few decades and not multiple times within 20 years," Harris said. "Modern technology in addition to an attentive public is going to help us recover more and more meteorites."

Our universe is filled with floating nebulae, spinning planets and black holes. But if we closed our eyes and listened, what would these celestial objects sound like? Would we hear a faint whoosh? Or a low hum?

In actuality, if you went to outer space, you probably won't hear very much at all. "There is that popular saying that 'no one can hear you scream in space' for a reason," Kimberly Arcand, a visualization scientist for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, told Live Science. "The nature of space is sort of silent."

At least, space seems silent because of the way that humans understand and process sound. "Sound is a compression wave," Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, told Live Science. This means that when sound travels through the air, it's actually energy propagating through a medium, where gas molecules move and knock against each other. These vibrations get detected by our ears, and our brains then translate them into sound.

"If you don't have a gas, if you don't have a medium, you have to have no sound because there's nothing there," Impey explained. "Things aren't bouncing into each other, and there's no way to carry the energy."

Space is largely a vacuum, meaning it has very few molecules. For instance, in the space between galaxies, there is on average less than one atom per cubic meter, making the air in space a billionth of a billionth times less dense than the air we breathe, Impey noted. This means that even if there were noises in other galaxies outside of the Milky Way, we wouldn't hear them because the sound can't travel through the vacuum to reach our galaxy.

But that doesn't mean space is completely devoid of noise. There are places, like the atmospheres of other planets or near the event horizons of black holes, where there are enough molecules to transmit vibrations. Because the densities of these mediums are so different from Earth's atmosphere, however, these sounds are undetectable to the human ear.

For example, researchers have found that supermassive black holes in the Perseus cluster burp out gas. This creates pressure waves — like sound waves, Arcand explained. By taking images of the gas molecules rippling into space, researchers calculated the amount of pressure transmitted in these burps to figure out what they would sound like.

Their analysis, published in 2003 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, places the tone at a low B flat. "It's like 57 octaves below middle C," Arcand said. "So it's really low, many octaves lower than humans could ever hope to hear."

Astronomers have also recorded sounds on Mars, since some Mars rovers are equipped with acoustic detectors. These instruments can capture the sound of wind on the Red Planet. But because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, the frequency of the sound is also very low and outside our hearing range, Impey said.

Sonification of space

Some scientists have recently started translating some of these faint sounds into rumblings that we can hear. This practice, whereby researchers imagine what space could sound like by transforming these data, is called sonification. Many scientists who work in sonification have a background in music, Arcand said, and use their knowledge to reimagine astronomy data into something people can experience, while also staying true to the data's context.

"Working on the Perseus cluster, we were really trying to stay true to the science of that B flat, and that idea of this super massive black hole burping out into all of this hot gas," Arcand said. As a result, she and her colleagues ended up with a supermassive black hole that sounds like a growling and burping entity.

Sonifying NASA's data has brought a whole new audience to space science, Arcand said, since space is often something that seems far away and abstract, while sound connects people to space because it's linked with emotions and memory.

This has been especially helpful for people who are blind or visually impaired, who are now learning new things about space through sonified data, according to a 2024 study published in the journal Frontiers of Communication.

And yet there are still many sounds to be found in space. Impey noted that Venus has a very dense atmosphere, and so its winds could sound very different from those on Earth or Mars — although landing an instrument on the scorching planet would be very difficult. NASA is also continually releasing more sonifications, reimagining its X-ray datasets from faraway galaxies as hums, grumbles and pops (which you can listen to here.)

"There's a quiet symphony that's happening in the universe," Arcand said. "So why not try to decode that so we can translate it and listen to it ourselves?"

Milky Way quiz: How well do you know our home galaxy?

NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back intriguing images of what looks like a piece of coral on Mars.

The strange object is in fact a small, light-colored, wind-eroded rock, which the rover found inside the Red Planet's Gale Crater on July 24 — but it looks remarkably similar to the reef-building creatures found in Earth's oceans.

A black and white picture taken with Curiosity's Remote Micro Imager — a high-resolution, telescopic camera that is mounted on the rover — and shared by NASA in a statement on Aug. 4 shows the approximately 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) rock with its intricate branches.

"Curiosity has found many rocks like this one, which were formed by ancient water combined with billions of years of sandblasting by the wind," NASA representatives wrote in the statement.

Coral-shaped rocks on Mars started forming billions of years ago, when the Red Planet still had water, according to the statement. Just like water on Earth, this water was full of dissolved minerals. It percolated through small cracks in Martian rocks, gradually depositing minerals and forming solid "veins" inside the rocks.

These veins form the strange branches of the coral-shaped object that we see in Curiosity's picture today, after millions of years of erosion by sand-laden winds wore away the rock.

Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

Other examples of unusual rocks found on Mars include "Paposo" — a strangely-shaped rock measuring about 2 inches (5 cm) across that Curiosity also discovered on July 24 — and a tiny, flower-shaped object, which the rover photographed in Gale Crater in 2022.

Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, touching down in the Gale Crater — a meteor impact crater on the boundary between the Red Planet's cratered southern highlands and its smooth northern plains. The rover's mission, led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is to scan the Martian surface for any signs that it was habitable at any point in the distant past.

So far, Curiosity has traversed roughly 22 miles (35 kilometers) of the 96-mile-wide (154 km) crater. Its path is meandering and slow, because it has to stop to drill into rocks, collect samples and gather data.

The rover's explorations have uncovered abundant evidence that the potential for life once existed on Mars, including long carbon chains from 3.7 billion-year-old rocks and signs that Mars once had a carbon cycle.

The search for alien life should consider the impact of cosmic rays, a new study suggests.

When scientists look for signs of life beyond Earth, first they check the extraterrestrial worlds inside the "Goldilocks zone" — the area around a star where sunlight makes it neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface. But a team of researchers has proposed another region where living things might exist: the "radiolytic habitable zone," where cosmic rays (also known as cosmic radiation) can generate enough energy to support life deep underwater or in ice.

"Life might be able to survive in more places than we ever imagined," Dimitra Atri, an astrophysicist at New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and co-author of the new study, said in a statement. "Instead of looking only for warm planets with sunlight, we can now consider places that are cold and dark, as long as they have some water beneath the surface and are exposed to cosmic rays."

The research, published July 28 in the International Journal of Astrobiology, investigated the potential for life on Mars, as well as on Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. These icy worlds are fairly hostile to life as we know it, at least on the surface. But beneath the surface, they hold vast quantities of liquid or frozen water. The researchers studied whether cosmic radiation may be able to energize chemical reactions in water enough to support biological activity.

Cosmic rays consist of highly energetic particles and atomic nuclei that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They are produced by stars, supernovas and, in some cases, black holes. On Earth, most cosmic rays fail to penetrate our planet's thick atmosphere. But on worlds with thinner atmospheres, like Mars, they can reach the surface — and possibly belowground.

Related: Tiny photosynthetic aliens could be lurking in hidden bubbles in Mars' ice — and could soon be replicated on Earth

In the new study, the team used computer simulations to model how much energy this cosmic radiation might deliver to the subsurface ice and water on Mars and worlds such as Jupiter's moon Europa. They found that some energetic particles could make it below the surface. Once there, the rays would then break apart the existing water molecules, releasing electrons in a process called electrolysis. This could potentially generate enough energy to support — and maybe even kick-start — life.

The researchers predicted that Saturn's icy moon Enceladus has the highest potential for supporting life, followed by Mars and Europa. Astrobiologists plan to study these worlds more closely in the coming years, using data from telescopes such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and probes like NASA's Europa Clipper, which is currently en route to the Jovian moon.

But the new study also has implications for the search for life beyond our solar system "This discovery changes the way we think about where life might exist," Atri said in the statement.

Four of the solar system's terrestrial planets, including Earth and a long-lost world, likely started life waltzing around the sun to a fixed rhythm, according to a new study. The findings also suggest that those planets formed earlier than previously thought.

Astronomers have been increasingly interested in how planetary systems change their internal architecture on cosmic timescales, motivated by several recent exoplanet family discoveries, like the seven-planet cohort orbiting the tiny star TRAPPIST-1.

Past research has found that one early stage in a planetary family's metamorphosis involves pairs, triplets or entire systems moving in a rhythmic beat — called resonance — around their parent star. Planets in resonance have orbital periods that form a whole-number ratio. In the TRAPPIST-1 system, for instance, the innermost planet, TRAPPIST-1 b, completes eight orbits for five of its nearest neighbor's.

Resonance arises among planets born within a protoplanetary disk — the disk of debris surrounding an infant star — that still contains gas. Such planets plow through the gas, exchanging their rotational motion with it, which often causes them to move toward the star. Many of these planets may come close enough to each other for their orbital periods to "resonate," or become whole-number multiples.

Today, the solar system's planets aren't in resonance (although Venus and Mars come close, with an orbital-period ratio of 3.05:1). But in 2005, astronomers showed that Jupiter and Saturn waltzed in a resonant beat soon after their birth. This dance halted abruptly 4.4 billion years ago, however, when the protoplanetary gas disk started evaporating, pushing Saturn, Uranus and Neptune outward in an event called the giant planetary instability.

Related: What's the maximum number of planets that could orbit the sun?

Until now, though, nobody had examined whether the terrestrial planets have ever been in resonance, Chris Ormel, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China and co-author of the new study, told Live Science by email. This was because "an alternative theory — that the planets formed by a series of giant impacts — was thought to be adequate" to explain how they currently behave, he said.

But research from 2013 analyzing Martian isotopes suggested that terrestrial planets could have formed when the protoplanetary disk was still rich in gas, about 10 million years after the solar system's birth. This meant the terrestrial planets may have once been in resonance.

To examine the hypothesis, the new study's authors created computer models of the infant solar system. Each model included two giant planets — Jupiter and Saturn — along with four rocky worlds: Mars, Theia (a hypothetical Mars-size object whose collision with early Earth formed our moon), early Earth (prior to Theia’s collision) and Venus. Mercury is widely believed to have been created by giant impacts, so the researchers excluded it from the simulations.

In all of the models, the team placed Saturn closer to Jupiter than it is today and had the rocky worlds grow by accumulating either pebbles or larger, trillion-ton rock blocks. In most simulations, Venus, Earth, Theia and Mars formed a 2:3:4:6 resonant chain within a million years of simulated time.

The researchers then performed 13,200 simulations of the planets' potential movements over a 100-million-year interval, considering the gravitational tugs each planet exerted on the others. At the 10 million-year mark, however, the researchers made Saturn move outward "to simulate the giant planet instability," Shuo Huang, a doctoral student at Tsinghua University and the study's first author, told Live Science by email.

The researchers found that, based on the selected parameters, up to half of the simulations re-created the terrestrial planets' current configuration. This included aspects like the occurrence of a single Theia-Earth collision and the 3.05:1 orbital-period ratio of Venus and Mars — a relic of their past resonance.

Additionally, the findings suggest the planets formed in the gas-filled protoplanetary disk, within the first 10 million years of the solar system's creation, which is at least 20 million years older than current models predict.

One planet that could confirm how old the rocky inner worlds are is Venus. Because it (unlike Earth and Mars) hasn't suffered any giant impacts, the authors think its mantle will reflect its ancient origin. And future missions could collect such mantle samples, Huang said.

The findings also indicate that outer giant planets can destabilize their inner companions tremendously. The authors said this may explain why resonant systems like TRAPPIST-1 don't have giant outer planets.

The new study was published July 18 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood?

A beautiful crescent moon will appear close to Mars after dark on Monday, July 28. The dancing duo will make their debut about 45 minutes after sunset and will be visible from across the world — just as several meteor showers approach their peaks.

The conjunction between the 19%-illuminated waxing crescent moon and the Red Planet will take place above due west, making it visible to most people, although a park or open field will provide a better view. The gap between the moon and Mars will be about 1 degree — roughly the width of your little finger held at arm's length.

Mars is well past its brightest point this year, but it remains a distinct, reddish dot in the twilight sky. The moon, meanwhile, will show Earthshine, a ghostly illumination of its night side caused by sunlight reflecting off Earth.

The spectacular sight of two of the brightest objects in the solar system alongside each other will come as meteor showers are beginning to dominate the sky. The peak of the Piscis Austrinid meteor shower will be in the early hours of July 28, when up to five meteors per hour will be visible under dark, clear skies. That makes it a minor affair, but it's just one of four meteor showers approaching their peak.

Overnight on July 29-30 will be the peak of the Delta Aquariid and Alpha Capricornid meteor showers. While the former's peak is known to be broad, up to 20 shooting stars per hour are possible. The latter adds another five per hour.

As a bonus, the crescent moon — together with Mars — will set a couple of hours after sunset, leaving the night skies dark and free of moonlight.

As if that weren't enough, the Perseids — the year's most prolific meteor shower — are arguably best viewed in late July. That's because its peak night, Aug. 12-13, will be marred by a bright moon. August's full Sturgeon Moon occurs on Saturday, Aug. 9, and on the peak night, an 84%-illuminated moon will shine brightly all night, making faint meteors hard to see.

All of this makes July 28 arguably one of the best evenings for seeing "shooting stars" this summer. The best views will be from locations with low levels of light pollution, such as a Dark Sky Place or an area that appears dark on a light pollution map. Check local weather forecasts, allow your eyes to adjust to the darkness for at least 20 minutes, and avoid looking at smartphone screens or other artificial lights.

Mars was a rainier, wetter place than planetary scientists previously thought, according to a new study of ancient, inverted river channels that span more than 9,000 miles (14,484 kilometers) in the Red Planet's southern Noachis Terra region.

"Our work is a new piece of evidence that suggests that Mars was once a much more complex and active planet than it is now, which is such an exciting thing to be involved in," study leader Adam Losekoot of the U.K.'s Open University said in a statement.

We've known Mars was once a wet planet ever since the Mariner 9 orbiter mission from the '70s photographed a surface covered in dried-up river channels. These channels were dated back to over 3.5 billion years ago. However, channels cut into the ground are not the only evidence for running water on Mars.

When that water ran-off, or evaporated, it left sedimentary deposits. Sometimes we see these in craters that were once lakes filled with water: NASA's Curiosity rover is exploring Gale Crater, which has a central three-mile-tall (five-kilometer-tall) peak covered in sediment.

Other times, these sediments were laid down on river beds. Over the eons, the sediments would have hardened, while the river channels and the land around them would have weathered and eroded away. That left the sediments, which are more resistant to erosion, sticking out as tall ridges. Geologists today call them fluvial sinuous ridges, or, more plainly, inverted channels.

Now, Losekoot, who is a Ph.D. student, has led the discovery of a vast network of these channels in Noachis Terra based on images and data taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the defunct Mars Global Surveyor mission.

Related: Could signs of Mars life be hidden in its thick layers of clay?

Previously, Noachis Terra had not been given due attention because it lacked the more classical river channels that form more obvious evidence of water. However, by mapping the network of inverted channels, Losekoot realized there was lots of evidence there had once been plentiful water in the region.

"Studying Mars, particularly an under-explored region like Noachis Terra, is really exciting because it's an environment which has been largely unchanged for billions of years," said Losekoot. "It's a time capsule that records fundamental geological processes in a way that just isn't possible here on Earth."

Some of the inverted channels appear as isolated segments that have survived the elements for billions of years. Others are more intact, forming systems that run for hundreds of miles and stand tens of yards tall.

Such a widespread network of inverted channels does not suggest these channels were caused by flash floods, argues Losekoot. Rather, they seem to have formed in stable climatic conditions over a geologically significant period of time during the Noachian–Hesperian transition, which was the shift from one geological era into the next around 3.7 billion years ago.

What's particularly intriguing is the most likely source of water to have formed these inverted channels is precipitation — be it rain, hail or snow. Indeed, given the size of the inverted channel network in Noachis Terra, this region of Mars may have experienced lots of rainy days in a warm and wet climate.

It's more evidence that Mars was once more like Earth than the cold and barren desert it is today.

Losekoot presented his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting held at the University of Durham in the U.K., which ran between July 7 and July 11.

This article was originally published on Space.com.