Like any good piece of high-tech hardware, NASA’s Perseverance rover features an Easter egg hidden in plain sight. Since landing on Mars on February 18th, NASA has been sharing thousands of photos captured by the rover. And if you look close enough, as Space did, you’ll catch a decal bolted to the top of its …
Depiction of the Perseverance landing, with the rover still attached to backshell and retro-rockets engaged for powered descent. Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech Failure could take on many forms next week when NASA’s next-gen rover, Perseverance, reaches the surface of the Red Planet. Here’s what needs to go right—and how things could quickly go sideways—when Perseverance tries to …
China’s plans for interplanetary exploration just took a big stride forward. The Guardian reports that the country’s Tianwen-1 probe has returned its first photo of Mars, capturing a black-and-white snapshot from about 1.4 million miles away. It doesn’t compare to the more detailed pictures from other explorers (certainly not those on the ground), but that’s …