Tag: Mars (Planet)

NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Ends Its Mars Mission

Ingenuity, the little Mars helicopter that could, can’t anymore. At least one rotor broke during the robotic flying machine’s most recent flight last week, NASA officials announced on Thursday. Ingenuity remains in contact with its companion, the Perseverance rover, which has been exploring a dried-up river bed for signs of extinct Martian life. Ingenuity will […]

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A Stunning Eclipse, a Moon Race and Other Space Events in 2024

Crucial Events on the Path Back to the Moon NASA wants to put American astronauts on the moon’s surface in the years ahead with the Artemis III mission. Before that can happen, though, many things have to go right, and two of the most important are scheduled for 2024. The first is the Artemis II […]

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Practicing for a Mars Mission in the Utah Desert

In May 1996, an autonomous resupply vehicle docked with Russia’s ailing Mir space station. It carried the usual items — food, clothes, scientific equipment — along with much more cherished ones. The American astronaut Shannon Lucid received M&Ms. For the two cosmonauts, Yuri Usachev and Yuri Onufriyenko, there were perfume-scented letters offering a welcome respite […]

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Mars Needs Insects

But gardening doesn’t just require a plot of land, a bit of water, a beam of sunlight. It also requires very animate ingredients: the insects, like black soldier flies, and microorganisms that keep these ecological systems in working order. A trip to Mars for a long-term stay, then, won’t just involve humans. It will also […]

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Maybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and Then Mars

The moon is a magnet, and it is pulling us back. Half a century ago, the astronauts of Apollo 17 spent three days on that pockmarked orb, whose gravitational pull tugs not just on our oceans but our imaginations. For 75 hours, the astronauts moonwalked in their spacesuits and rode in a lunar rover, with […]

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Elon Musk’s Savior Complex

In his biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow writes that Hamilton “always had to fight the residual sadness of the driven man.” That sentence has stayed with me because I’ve also noticed that there can be something sad about extremely ambitious people — like they’re striving furiously to fill a hole that was carved into […]

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