When the first humans go to Mars, they may want to bring lichens with them. Because lichens are mini-ecosystems made of both fungi and algae or bacteria, they are particularly good at surviving the extreme conditions on Mars, and could even be used to produce rocket fuel in space.

Europe and Russia's ExoMars rover has been assigned its destination on the Red Planet. The robot explorer will almost certainly land on Oxia Planum -- a site rich in iron-magnesium clays near the equator -- say scientists from the Landing Site Selection Working Group (LSSWG) in Leicester, UK. They've been discussing touchdown options for around four years and -- with the blessings of the European and Russian space agencies...

Using an AI design process, engineers at software company Autodesk and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came up with a new interplanetary lander concept that could explore distant moons like Europa and Enceladus. Its slim design weighs less than most of the landers that NASA has already sent to other planets and moons.

A major problem with Mars missions: Bringing enough fuel for a return journey. In a striking new first-person account in IEEE Spectrum, NASA team lead Kurt Leucht writes about how the space agency is hard at work on a potential solution he hopes will let future Mars missions — or even colonists — extract rocket fuel from Martian soil.

Due to land in 2021, the ExoMars rover will be the first of its kind to travel across the Martian surface and drill down to determine if evidence of life is buried underground. Dr Graham Turnock, Chief Executive, UK Space Agency said: After the Earth, Mars is the most habitable planet in the Solar System, so it’s a perfect destination to explore the possibility of life on other planets, as well as the history of our own.

Mars is about to get its first U.S. visitor in years: a three-legged, one-armed geologist to dig deep and listen for quakes. NASA’s InSight makes its grand entrance through the rose-tinted Martian skies on Monday, after a six-month, 300 million-mile (480 million-kilometer) journey. It will be the first American spacecraft to land since the Curiosity rover in 2012 and the first dedicated to exploring underground.

ESA’s Mars Express has imaged an intriguing part of the Red Planet’s surface: a rocky, fragmented, furrowed escarpment lying at the boundary of the northern and southern hemisphere. This region is an impressive example of past activity on the planet and shows signs of where flowing wind, water and ice once moved material from place to place, carving out distinctive patterns and landforms as it did so.

Elon Musk, age 47, told "Axios on HBO" that he sees a 70% chance that he'll live to ride one of his SpaceX rockets to Mars. "I know exactly what to do," he said. "I’m talking about moving there." The big picture: That prediction is dismissed as fantasy by some experts. But Musk said he can envision a flight as soon as seven years from now, with a ticket price of "around a couple hundred thousand dollars."

NASA's first robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of a distant world hurtled closer to Mars on course for a planned touchdown on Monday after a six-month voyage through space. Traveling 301 million miles (548 million km) from Earth, the Mars InSight spacecraft was due to reach its destination on the dusty, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet at about 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT).

"Does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people?"

As Mars colonization inches ever closer to becoming a reality, some have argued that the ability to afford a ticket to the Red Planet is a luxury afforded only to the wealthiest members of society. Billionaire Elon Musk has said it’ll run potential Mars inhabitants traveling with his company SpaceX hundreds of thousands of dollars to get there. But in a new interview, he rebuffed the assertion that a one-way ticket to Mars is an easy ticket out for the rich.

A NASA spacecraft's six-month journey to Mars neared its dramatic grand finale Monday in what scientists and engineers hoped would be a soft precision landing on flat red plains. The InSight lander aimed for an afternoon touchdown, as anxiety built among those involved in the $1 billion international effort.

Today NASA will attempt its eighth successful landing of a robot on the red planet by venturing to place its InSight lander—a spacecraft almost 10 years and nearly one billion dollars in the making—as gently as possible on the vast planes of Mars' Elysium Planitia.

On Monday afternoon, NASA’s InSight spacecraft will try to land on Mars.

NASA’s next Mars mission will have a helicopter onboard. The Mars 2020 mission, slated to launch in July 2020, is a rover designed to look for signs of past or present life on the Red Planet. NASA has just announced that another explorer called the Mars Helicopter will be hitching a ride.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says the U.S. is within 10 years of having a continuous manned presence on the moon, which will lay the groundwork for expanding space exploration to Mars. “Right now we’re building a space station, we call it ‘Gateway,’ that’s going to be in orbit around the moon — think of it as a reusable command module where we can have human presence in orbit around the moon. From there we want reusable landers that go back and forth to the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons and Buck Sexton on “Rising.”

Experience gleaned from EO-1 satellite will help JPL build science smarts into next rover.

Nasa has spotted a strange, shiny object lying on the Martian surface. The planet is largely red, dusty and bland, meaning that anything unusual stands out. The latest discovery is one such object: a shiny lump that is visible on the surface. Now the team behind the Curiosity rover intends to have a proper look at the object, in the hope of finding out what it is. Though they have their suspicions, they are ready to be surprised.

NASA just announced it has heard the first-ever “sounds” of wind on Mars. But if you’re expecting howling, swooshes and crackles, you’re in for a surprise. These are vibrations, captured by NASA’s InSight lander, which touched down on the Red Planet just last week. The craft will stay put until November 24, 2020, measuring quakes that happen anywhere on Mars.