For astronaut safety and to bolster success of the human exploration to come later, NASA needs an end-to-end demonstration of ...

U.S. plans to return Mars samples face delays as China advances its own mission. Scientists and policymakers debate costs, timelines, and the role of sample return in future Mars exploration ...

While NASA's Mars Sample Return initiative is in political hot water, China is moving ahead on plotting out its rendezvous with the Red Planet. China's roadmap for a Mars Sample Return mission to be ...

NASA's Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, designed to bring drilled rock samples from the Martian surface back to Earth to ...

A mission called Mars Sample Return (MSR) is currently being cooked up over at NASA, and it's so incredibly complex and expensive that it has the agency's people running like crazy from place to place ...

The race to Mars has quietly become the defining contest of twenty-first century spaceflight, pitting a state-backed Chinese ...

In what appears to be a jab at NASA, Rocket Lab this week unveiled its own plan to return rock and dust samples the space agency has been collecting from Mars’ Jezero Crater since 2021. NASA earlier ...

NASA aims to return Martian soil and rock samples to Earth in the 2030s, marking the first such planetary sample return mission. A decision on the mission profile is delayed until mid-2026. Two ...

The spacecraft that has quietly rewritten our understanding of Mars just crossed a very visible milestone: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured its 100,000th close-up view of the Red Planet.