Mars 2020

Ingenuity is no longer just the world's most expensive hobby helicopter. The International Civil Aviation Organization has given an official flight designator and call-sign codes for Ingenuity and the "Wright Brothers Field" where it flew this week.

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter made history again today by flying horizontally on Mars for the first time. The rotorcraft lifted off and flew for 51.9 seconds, reaching an altitude of 16 ft and flying laterally for 7 ft before descending safely.

NASA has awarded Northrop Grumman a contract worth up to US$84.5 million to help develop the Mars Ascent Propulsion System, which will be used as part of a plan to return samples collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth.

NASA has released a new video that includes historic color, high-resolution footage from multiple cameras on the Mars 2020 spacecraft as it delivered the Perseverance rover to the surface of the Red Planet last week.

NASA has announced that, soon after yesterday’s launch of the Mars Perseverance rover, that mission had experienced minor issues that hindered communication and caused the spacecraft couriering the rover to enter a "safe mode."

NASA's Mars 2020 mission and the Perseverance rover are on their way to Mars. At 4:50 am EDT (11:50 GMT), the spacecraft lifted off on the first leg of its 309-million-mile voyage to search for signs of life on the Red Planet.

The spacecraft containing NASA's Perseverance rover has been successfully mated with the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that will propel it towards Mars at the end of the month.

An international team of scientists is conducting the experiments designed for NASA's Perseverance Mars rover here on Earth. The purpose is to provide a baseline with which to compare the data returned from the Red Planet.

Coaxed carefully by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars 2020 has taken its full weight on its wheels and legs for the first time as part of several weeks of tests.

With an eye to making future unmanned and manned planetary landing missions safer, NASA has installed the first components of the advanced Mars Entry, Descent and Landing Instrumentation 2 (MEDLI2) sensor suite aboard the Mars 2020 entry vehicle.

NASA's Mars 2020 rover got a bit of a workout recently as it flexed its mechanical muscles. Captured in a time-lapse video, the robotic arm with its 88-lb "hand" did a bit of curling as space agency engineers guided it from its deployed to its stowed configuration for launch to the Red Planet.

NASA has given the green light to begin placing the plutonium-238 dioxide fuel into the nuclear Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG) on the Mars 2020 robotic rover that will provide it with heat and electricity.