There's a small rocket company based in eastern California named Pythom Space. And like a lot of space startups, it has big dreams. In this case, co-founders Tina and Tom Sjögren have the goal of flying to Mars in 2024—and if not then, by 2026.

NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity just flew farther and faster than it ever has before. The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity aced its 25th flight on the Red Planet last Friday (April 8), setting new personal bests for speed and distance. "#MarsHelicopter is breaking records again! Ingenuity completed its 25th and most ambitious flight. It broke its distance and ground speed records, traveling 704 meters [2,310 feet] at 5.5 meters per second while flying for 161.3 seconds," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages Ingenuity's mission, tweeted on Tuesday (April 12).

The space agency hopes to build a city in the Martian desert by the end of the next decade, writes Adam Smith

On Mars, every last resource counts.

The tiny Mars helicopter Ingenuity continues to power through its flights, exceeding all expectations.

NASA has created an online tool that simulates how you’d sound on the red planet. That’s right: You can drop your own Mars bars in a round of interstellar karaoke.

Ingenuity and NASA's Perseverance rover are headed toward an ancient Martian river delta.

More than a year ago, NASA’s Perseverance rover soared through the Martian atmosphere and touched down on the Red Planet. “We closed our eyes in Florida and opened them on another planet,” Jim Bell, the principle investigator of the rover’s camera, Mastcam-Z, and a researcher at Arizona State University, tells Popular Mechanics.

The Ingenuity helicopter's Red Planet flight tally is up to 21. The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) NASA chopper just aced another Mars sortie, agency officials announced today (March 11). "#MarsHelicopter can’t be stopped! Ingenuity successfully completed its 21st flight on the Red Planet. The small rotorcraft traveled 370 meters [1,214 feet] at a speed of 3.85 meters per second [8.61 mph] and stayed aloft for 129.2 seconds," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages Ingenuity's mission, said via Twitter today.

Organic molecules and clay minerals found in Gale Crater could be a sign of ancient Martian life, but it isn’t possible yet to rule out that they are products of inorganic processes

NASA's Curiosity rover recently got up close and personal with a tiny, flower-like mineral deposit on the surface of Mars. The beautiful branching rock, which is just 0.4 inch (1 centimeter) wide, looks a bit like a coral or a sponge. Despite its likeness to a living organism, however, the deposit is not alive and is a fairly common sight across the Martian landscape.

Researchers at Australia’s Curtin University have discovered evidence of a massive impact on the Martian surface after 4.45 billion years ago. This may not seem like a surprising revelation – after all, we know that there were several large impacts on Mars, like Hellas and Argyre, and we know that large impacts happened frequently in the early solar system – so why is this a big deal?

It's "very unlikely" the British-built Mars rover, Rosalind Franklin, will launch this year. The European Space Agency (Esa) says the project is now at risk because of the worsening diplomatic crisis over the war in Ukraine. The robot is part of a joint venture with the Russian space agency.

In the coming decades, space agencies from around the world will be venturing farther out into space than ever before. This includes returning to the Moon (perhaps to stay this time), exploring Mars, and maybe even establishing human settlements on both. Beyond that, there are even proposals for establishing habitats in space that could accommodate millions.

A design for a settlement on Mars has been dubbed as looking like a giant bagel with architects work on plans that could maintain a colony by shielding people from deadly sandstorms and radiation.

The Perseverance rover is a capable machine, but one thing it can’t do is send rock, sediment and atmospheric samples from Mars back to Earth by itself. NASA hopes to retrieve some of those through its Mars Sample Return Program, and it’s taken another step forward in the project. The agency has chosen Lockheed Martin to build the first rocket to be fired off another planet.

Radar images of Mars’s southern ice cap indicated that there could be a lake there – but a new set of simulations hints that it could be volcanic rock instead

Multiple images from the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) were used to generate this view of a regional dust storm obscuring Syrtis Major and Jezero Crater (white circle). The images were acquired on Jan. 9, 2022.

NASA's Curiosity rover has found some interesting organic compounds on the Red Planet that could be signs of ancient Mars life, but it will take a lot more work to test that hypothesis. Some of the powdered rock samples that Curiosity has collected over the years contain organics rich in a type of carbon that here on Earth is associated with life, researchers report in a new study.

A 4 billion-year-old meteorite from Mars that caused a splash here on Earth decades ago contains no evidence of ancient, primitive Martian life after all, scientists reported Thursday. In 1996, a NASA-led team announced that organic compounds in the rock appeared to have been left by living creatures. Other scientists were skeptical and researchers chipped away at that premise over the decades, most recently by a team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science's Andrew Steele.