JPL

NASA's Perseverance Rover might have made serious headway in its mission to find signs of ancient life on the planet. It's stumbled upon a rock with colorful spots on it, which may have been left behind by microbial life billions of years ago.

There aren't any organizations other than NASA that can claim they are operating on two different planets. The space agency is now using that reach to create better helicopter blades on Earth and to push its copter to greater heights on Mars.

As far as landscapes go, Mars is pretty dull – it’s mostly just rocks and craters. But now the Perseverance rover has spotted a couple of particularly weird rocks that have been hollowed out in eerie shapes.

A new discovery has boosted the chances of life soon being found on another world. NASA has announced the detection of phosphorus, the rarest element that’s essential to life, in the oceans of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

It may look like a lightsaber sitting on the surface of Mars, but this titanium tube is a sample canister dropped off by Perseverance. This could eventually be the first pristine sample of Martian soil and rock returned to Earth in a future mission.

Subsurface oceans on moons are some of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth. NASA is now funding a project to develop a swarm of small swimming robots that would explore these alien oceans for signs of extraterrestrial life.

The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has now reached a major milestone. A new batch of 65 exoplanets brings the total number of confirmed planets beyond our solar system to over 5,000 – with potentially hundreds of billions left to find.

NASA has monitored potentially hazardous asteroids for decades, but some factors couldn't be accounted for. The new Sentry-II system has now gone online, allowing astronomers to calculate the orbits and impact chances of asteroids far more precisely.

Editor’s note: New details about this fascinating object have emerged since we wrote this article – here's the latest update.

In NGC 6946, better known as the Fireworks galaxy, an extremely bright flare of X-rays was seen to appear and disappear within a matter of weeks.

Earth’s pleasant, life-giving atmosphere is turning out to be somewhat of an oddity. To get a better understanding of exoplanets, a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has recreated one of these alien atmospheres in the lab.

The galaxy W2246-0526 sits 12.4 billion light-years from Earth – almost the entire radius of the observable universe – and is the most luminous galaxy ever discovered, with the brightness of 350 trillion Suns. Now, astronomers have found that W2246-0526 is cannibalizing three neighboring galaxies.