This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows Korolev crater, an 82-kilometre-across feature found in the northern lowlands of Mars. This oblique perspective view was generated using a digital terrain model and Mars Express data gathered over orbits 18042 (captured on 4 April 2018), 5726, 5692, 5654, and 1412. The crater itself is centred at 165° E, 73° N on the martian surface. The image has aresolution of roughly 21 metres per pixel.

The stunning Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars is filled with ice all year round owing to a trapped layer of cold Martian air that keeps the water frozen. The 50-mile-wide crater contains 530 cubic miles of water ice, as much as Great Bear Lake in northern Canada, and in the centre of the crater the ice is more than a mile thick.

Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars to transform the atmosphere and make it more suitable for human life. The SpaceX CEO made a new reference to his grand plan on Friday, as he joked with a TV producer on Twitter that the Korolev crater “needs a warmup.” The crater was shared in an image from the European Space Agency on Thursday, taken by the Mars Express High-Resolution Stereo Camera. The 50-mile-wide site, filled with ice, is situated in the northern lowlands of Mars.

One of the first men to orbit the Moon has told BBC Radio 5 Live that it's "stupid" to plan human missions to Mars. Bill Anders, lunar module pilot of Apollo 8, the first human spaceflight to leave Earth's orbit, said sending crews to Mars was "almost ridiculous". Nasa is currently planning new human missions to the Moon.

Space fans had plenty to celebrate in 2018, including the launch of three new NASA missions and the debut of SpaceX’s giant Falcon Heavy rocket. In case you missed any of the action, here are 11 space stories that were particularly noteworthy.

Landing a spot on Mars One's planned rocket to the red planet isn't easy. The selection process has been going on for five years already. After three rounds, 4,200 applicants -- "from architect to janitor," Politico points out -- have been whittled down to an even 100. No more than 24 Earthlings ultimately will be chosen to transform themselves into Martians.

"Starship will look like liquid silver."

Eleven months ago—just after SpaceX astonished the world by launching and landing its titanic Falcon Heavy rocket while beaming back images of a red Tesla leaving Earth orbit—company founder Elon Musk had already begun to look beyond the moment. The Falcon Heavy was a big, capable rocket. But it wasn't large enough to fulfill his aspirations of reaching Mars. Neither did the company have a spacecraft capable of landing there.

The U.S. government may be in partial shutdown mode, but operations to configure instruments critical to NASA’s InSight mission on Mars are right on schedule—and things are going swimmingly, as the latest mission update attests. Our last update from the InSight mission came on December 20 following the probe’s successful deployment of the SEIS instrument, or Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, onto the Martian surface. The configuration of this hexagonal-shaped device is still ongoing, but an update from the SEIS team shows things are proceeding as planned.

In a reversal of a deal local officials had touted as a win for Los Angeles tech, SpaceX will no longer build its Mars spaceship and rocket booster system at the Port of Los Angeles. Instead, work to develop and test the prototype will be done in south Texas. SpaceX said in a statement Wednesday that the decision was made to “streamline operations.”

NASA's Opportunity rover has now been on Mars for 15 years, but the milestone is a bittersweet one. Opportunity touched down on the night of Jan. 24, 2004, a few weeks after its twin, Spirit, landed on a different patch of Red Planet ground. Both solar-powered rovers embarked on three-month missions to search for signs of past water activity — and both delivered in spades, finding plenty of such evidence and continuing to roam long after their warranties expired.

We knew we were in for a very cold, potentially life-threatening, week, but we had no idea that it was going to be this cold, like Mars-is-looking-pretty-good-now-compared-to-Earth degree of coldness. According to Mars Weather, a Twitter account that posts updates on the weather on the red planet, in certain parts of North America, the high temperatures yesterday were even lower than Mars' last reported high...

Mired in dust on the afternoon of June 10, 2018, NASA’s Opportunity rover received a final command from Earth. Take a photo of the sun, the Deep Space Network sang in code. Send telemetry. The rover’s cameras could barely see through all the swirling dust, which had been blown aloft by a planet-spanning storm. The sky was darkening, and Opportunity’s batteries, powered by sunlight, were draining. The reply was grim. The last transmitted image showed solar radiation was one fortieth its pre-storm level.

Record-smashing cold temperatures have led to a wave of headlines highlighting how parts of the U.S. are now colder than Mars. In parts of media, this is now a near-yearly ritual: The Atlantic had a story on it in 2017, and even NASA’s Curiosity Rover tweeted it a few winters ago. But what does “colder than Mars” really mean? Does it mean your friends in the Midwest — assuming they survive the Polar Vortex — have conquered their first round of Martian training? Not quite.

Braving deep isolation and sweaty spacesuits, six "analog astronauts" tested their tools, talents, and grit on a mock trip to the red planet.

Ready to start a new life on Mars? Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur vying to send humans to the red planet within the next decade, claimed on Monday that the cost of a ticket will one day enable “most people in advanced economies” to feasibly give up their Earth-bound dwellings and move to Mars. The SpaceX CEO stated via Twitter that he’s “confident” moving to Mars will one day cost $500,000 for a return ticket, possibly dropping further to below $100,000. These figures, Musk explained, are “very dependent on volume.”

Fancied being part of a reality TV show about colonizing Mars? Sorry.

Mars One Ventures — the company that claimed it was going to send hundreds of people to live (and ultimately die) on the Red Planet — is now bankrupt, according to Swiss financial notices. It’s an unsurprising development, as many experts suspected that Mars One has been a scam for years, preying on people’s desires to travel to space without having a real plan to get them there.

A brutal dust storm engulfed Mars last summer. The planet-wide tempest spared the nuclear-powered Curiosity rover, but the older, solar-powered Opportunity rover shut down as the thick dust blocked light from the Sun. Opportunity has remained silent since June 10, 2018, despite NASA’s hundreds of attempts to contact it. When a windy season on Mars began in November, scientists hoped that gusts might clear debris from its solar panels, but that hope appears to have been in vain.

NASA is trying one last time to contact its record-setting Mars rover Opportunity, before calling it quits. The rover has been silent for eight months, victim of one of the most intense dust storms in decades. Thick dust darkened the sky last summer and, for months, blocked sunlight from the spacecraft’s solar panels.