On the outskirts of Houston, four people have been living a version of the future that most of us only see in science fiction. For more than a year, they have been sealed inside a mock Martian base, ...
Mars has always felt like a distant neighbor, reachable only after a long, risky cruise through deep space. Now engineers inside NASA are sketching a very different future, one where a nuclear powered ...
Like Earth, Mars is surrounded by an ionosphere—the part of its upper atmosphere where radiation from the sun knocks electrons off of atoms and molecules, creating charged particles. The Martian ...
As humanity prepares to take its first steps on Mars, a comprehensive report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and steered by scientists at Penn State lays out ...