Mount Sharp, officially known as Aeolis Mons, forms the central peak within a very large crater named Gale that is 155 km in diameter. The mountain stands about 5 km tall, its lower flanks exposing hundreds of rock layers. The rock layers – alternating between lake, river and wind deposits – bear

The new findings combine more than two years of data collected by the rover since its sky-crane landing inside Gale Crater in August 2012. Scientists discovered stacks of rocks containing water-deposited sediments inclined toward the crater’s centre, which now sports a three-mile (5km) mound called

The barrier was discovered in the Van Allen radiation belts – a collection of charged particles, gathered in place by Earth’s magnetic field – using NASA’s Van Allen probes, launched in August 2012 to study the region. The Van Allen belts themselves were detected in 1958 by the U.S. satellite

Comet Siding Spring traveled from the most distant region of our Solar System, the Oort Cloud. It made a close approach to Mars on October 19, 2014, within about 139,500 km of the planet. Dust from the comet impacted Mars and was vaporized high in the atmosphere, producing what was likely an

In the summer of 1975, at the behest of NASA, a group of professors, volunteers, and students at Stanford University spent 10 weeks imagining what human colonization of space would look like and how, exactly, it would work. Their aim was to outline a system "as technologically complete and sound as