Mars

A brain drain from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory could pose problems for the space agency’s ambitious science plans

Establishing a permanent Mars settlement in the foreseeable future makes little sense. The weakest reason for doing it is also the strongest—and not in a good way

SpaceX’s Starship—the most powerful rocket ever built—experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in its otherwise successful second full-scale launch, triggering a federal investigation into what went wrong

Fresh investigations find that the Red Planet’s liquid-metal core is smaller than scientists thought

Increasing NASA’s budget would ease pressure and allow it to dream even bigger

Images from each and every spacecraft now orbiting Mars have ruled out a meteorite strike as the cause of a 4.7-magnitude marsquake, the strongest temblor ever detected beyond Earth

NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected valuable samples, but a new report says the plan to fetch them is unworkable

The U.S. may not beat China at retrieving Martian rocks first, according to an independent review board’s conclusion. But the U.S. can still lead with an exchange of samples here on Earth

Scientists are gearing up for a high-stakes finale to OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to snare a sample from an asteroid

Privately owned space colonies are more likely to be totalitarian nightmares than libertarian utopias

Delays and budgetary overruns are causing many to worry that NASA’s ambitious planetary science program is at a breaking point

New results from a U.A.E. orbiter suggest Mars’s moons may be pieces of the planet. A Japanese mission will tell us for sure