Curiosity Rover

Whether it's watching the news or checking a bank account, adults often deal with uncertainty by switching off – even when that knowledge is useful. Now, scientists have identified when it is we start to go down the "ignorance is bliss" path, and why.

New discoveries by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover may not only explain why the Red Planet is a dry, lifeless desert, but that it may have been on an inevitable path to being a dead world despite being so similar to Earth. And the Sun is to blame.

Data from NASA's Curiosity rover collected on Mars is shedding new light on how the Red Planet became uninhabitable in the distant past due to a changing climate that caused the surface water to evaporate or be locked away as ice.

Space is one of the most versatile and photogenic subjects, and this year was no different. From a sunrise captured by the International Space Station to the most distant star ever observed, here are some of the best space photographs taken in 2023.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered opal on Mars. The deposits may prove to be valuable to future Martian explorers not as jewelry but as a potential source of water.

Mars may be incredibly dry and dusty today, but evidence is piling up that it was once a watery world. Now the Curiosity rover has found signs of an ancient flood of biblical proportions, most likely kicked off by a climate-changing asteroid impact.

For over a year, NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover has been investigating the clay-bearing unit in the Gale Crater. Now the intrepid explorer is on the move, starting a summer-long journey to a higher part of Mount Sharp dubbed the "sulfate-bearing unit."

Organic compounds have been discovered on Mars in recent years. A new study examines the different ways that one type in particular, thiophene, may have formed, and intriguingly one of the most plausible scenarios involves ancient microbial life.

NASA has used Curiosity's cameras to capture many images of Mars since touching down on the Red Planet, but none quite as detailed as this, a new panorama showing the rugged Martian landscape through a grand total of 1.8 billion pixels.

Data from the Curiosity rover positioned within the Gale Crater on Mars has revealed repeating patterns of wild seasonal swings in oxygen levels, something mission scientists neither expected or are currently able to explain.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has made a map of the distribution of watery minerals in the Martian surface, studied how the global dust storm affected the atmosphere, and intriguingly found very little methane, which calls into question the results of a study just last week.

​​NASA’s Curiosity rover has passed yet another impressive milestone, having spent 2,000 Martian days exploring one of the most enigmatic and fascinating worlds populating our solar system.