NASA has officially selected Lockheed Martin Space to build the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), which is essentially a small, lightweight rocket to help transport rock, sediment, and atmospheric samples from the surface of the Red Planet. It will be designed to retrieve samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover and deliver them to Earth for advanced study.
The Heinz Tomato Ketchup Marz Edition isn’t just a gimmick, as it uses real tomatoes grown in conditions similar to those found on Mars. This means that the Martian soil, temperature and even the water conditions were recreated here on Earth.
Architecture firm Abiboo reveals Nüwa, a sustainable city on Mars, which is a design concept that ranked as a finalist among 175 projects submitted from around the world for the 2020 Mars Socity competition. The Red Planet does not have the surface conditions of Earth, so to address that issue, the city boasts vertical structures built into the side of a cliff. There are a total of five cities, each accommodating between 200,000 and 250,000 inhabitants.
NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission arrived July 4, 1997 on the Red Planet. Its small rover, named Sojourner after abolitionist Sojourner Truth, spent 83 days of an initially planned 7-day mission, exploring the Martian terrain. A multitude of images were captured, while also taking chemical, atmospheric and other measurements. The final data transmission was received from Pathfinder at 6:23 am EST on September 27, 1997.
The European Space Agency has created a short film of the Korolev crater using an image mosaic made from single orbit observations from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on Mars Express. These images combines data from the HRSC nadir and color channels, with the former aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down. Next, the mosaic was combined with topography information from the stereo channels of HRSC to generate a three-dimensional landscape.