Mars News - MarsDaily,com brings you the news of Mars - rovers, landers, orbiters. http://www.marsdaily.com/index.html Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT en-us A NASA rover has discovered more building blocks of life on Mars after carrying out a chemistry experiment never before conducted on another planet, scientists said Tuesday. The organic molecules are not definitive evidence of past life, the NASA-led team emphasised, because they could also have formed on the red planet or crash-landed on meteorites. But it proves that these important cl]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT ESA's Mars Express has captured a blanket of dark volcanic ash creeping across the Martian surface in just decades, a rate of change that stands in stark contrast to the geological timescales that typically govern visible transformation on the Red Planet. A new image from Mars Express's High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) shows a scene of two halves, with Mars's bright tan-coloured sands ]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT Luna Labs has selected University of North Carolina at Greensboro chemistry professor Nicholas Oberlies to lead a NASA-funded study of fungi as potential construction materials for future missions to the moon and Mars. The project examines whether fungal growth combined with local regolith could form durable structural elements for off-world habitats. The team aims to determine if specific]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT Researchers explore recycling plant and human waste into fertilizer to transform barren moon and Mars surfaces into fertile fields for extraterrestrial agriculture. Their work appears in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry. 'In lunar and Martian outposts, organic wastes will be key to generating healthy, productive soils,' explains Harrison Coker, the first author on the study. 'By weathering si]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT What happens when a solar superstorm slams into Mars? ESA scientists now have their clearest answer yet, thanks to coordinated observations by the agency's Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). In May 2024, the largest solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth, driving the atmosphere into overdrive and producing vivid auroras visible as far south as Mexico. The same sto]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT Tardigrades, commonly known as water bears, may be better suited by a new name: Tardiguardians of the Galaxy. Unlike the fictional ragtag team of unenthusiastic heroes, the microscopic animals are providing real insight into how humans could adapt extraterrestrial resources to support space exploration, as well as whether such resources could help protect against the Earthly contaminants that hu]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT A NASA humanoid robot that helped pioneer advanced walking and manipulation capabilities for future Mars missions has returned to the United States after a 10 year deployment in Scotland. The robot, known as Valkyrie, has been based at the University of Edinburgh under a long term lease agreement with NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas. Valkyrie is a human sized platform standing about 1]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT The results from our first visit to the "Nevado Sajama" drill location were intriguing enough to motivate our return to do a deeper dive into the minerals and compounds locked in this rock with SAM (the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite). As explained in the last blog, that deeper dive involves using the second of two vials of a chemical reagent, tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH)]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT The United Arab Emirates announced on Tuesday that it would extend its Mars probe mission, now in its fifth year, for an additional three, underlining the oil-rich state's space ambitions. The UAE's Hope probe arrived in orbit around Mars in 2021 after a seven-month voyage through space, making it the first Arab country to explore the Red Planet with a $200 million investment. The Emirat]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT NASA has set clear goals at Mars: search for evidence of ancient life, understand the planet's climate and geology, and prepare for human exploration. Those objectives depend on a robust link between spacecraft at Mars and mission teams on Earth, with every image and dataset traveling hundreds of millions of kilometers across interplanetary space. Rocket Lab positions its proposed Mars Telecommu]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT What appears to be a single volcanic eruption is often the result of complex processes operating deep beneath the surface, where magma moves, evolves, and changes over long periods of time. To fully understand how volcanoes work, scientists study the volcanic products that erupt at the surface, which can reveal the hidden magmatic systems feeding volcanic activity. New research published r]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT SpaceX is putting its longstanding focus of sending humans to Mars on the backburner to prioritize establishing a settlement on the Moon, founder Elon Musk said Sunday. The South Africa-born billionaire's space company has found massive success as a NASA contractor, but critics have for years panned Musk's Mars colonization plans as overambitious. The move also puts Musk in alignment wit]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT Mars has emerged from its holiday behind the Sun, and we here on Earth have been able to reconnect with Curiosity and get back to work on Mars. Our first planning day last Friday gave Curiosity a full weekend of activities, which wrapped up with getting us ready for our next drill. We checked out a broken white rock in the workspace with APXS, MAHLI, and ChemCam's laser spectrometer and fi]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT In a new study, researchers say that non-biological sources they considered could not fully account for the abundance of organic compounds in a sample collected on Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover. In March 2025, scientists reported identifying small amounts of decane, undecane, and dodecane in a rock sample analyzed in the chemistry lab aboard Curiosity. These were the largest organic compo]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first AI planned drives ever carried out on another planet, using a vision capable generative AI system to map out safe routes across the rim of Jezero Crater without human route planners intervening in the usual way. The demonstration, run on Dec 8 and Dec 10, 2025, used generative AI to create waypoints for the six wheeled rover, taking ov]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:12:24 GMT