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Mars today is pretty dry. But billions of years ago, water flowed across the red planet. It ran in rivers that carved deep valleys.

A heartbreaking, out-of-the-gate failure of Russia’s sample return mission early this year created a wide circle of disappointment. For Russia, it was supposed to be a "cavalry charge" toward a hyperambitious goal that would have redeemed a quarter-century of interplanetary impotence but instead became a cosmic humiliation when the craft died shortly after liftoff. For planetary science, it meant that the composition of the Martian moon Phobos remains speculative and its origins still undetermined

A heartbreaking, out-of-the-gate failure of Russia’s sample return mission early this year created a wide circle of disappointment. For Russia, it was supposed to be a "cavalry charge" toward a hyperambitious goal that would have redeemed a quarter-century of interplanetary impotence but instead became a cosmic humiliation when the craft died shortly after liftoff. For planetary science, it meant that the composition of the Martian moon Phobos remains speculative and its origins still undetermined

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is just days away from arriving at the edge of a huge crater after a years-long trek on the Red Planet. Opportunity has been driving for nearly three years toward the crater Endeavour , an immense scar in the Martian surface about 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide. Now the rover is less than 31 feet (50 meters) from the rim and is due to pull up to it later this week, mission scientists said Monday (Aug

Forget sending huge, expensive remote-controlled robot probes to Mars--could a swarm of smaller, cheaper units that roam the surface using honeybee-like thinking actually do the job better? Just last week, NASA's next Martian rover Curiosity got its first taste of Mars-like conditions inside a pressure and atmospheric chamber designed to simulate the kind of environment it'll encounter when it actually lands on Mars's regolith several years from now. It's a huge, complex process to get this huge (9-foot long, 2,000 pound), complex vehicle ready for its scientific mission