It's the Martian version of spring break: Curiosity and Opportunity, along with their spacecraft friends circling overhead, will take it easy this month because of the sun's interference.
Fresh off drilling into a rock for the first time, the Mars rover Curiosity is prepping for the next step: dissecting the pulverized rock to determine what it's made of.
Matt Heverly starts each workday eagerly awaiting a message - one that must travel 215 million miles through the cold, dark, no man's land of outer space to reach him.
A meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb Friday, its sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring nearly 1,000 people.
In a Mars first, the Curiosity rover drilled into a rock and prepared to dump an aspirin-sized pinch of powder into its onboard laboratories for closer inspection.
A 150-foot-wide asteroid will come remarkably close to Earth next week, even closer than high-flying communication and weather satellites. It will be the nearest known flyby for an object of this size.
Scientists have zeroed in on a Martian target for the Curiosity rover to drill into: A rock outcrop as flat as a pool table that's expected to yield fresh insight into the red planet's history.
From 9,000 feet up on the driest place on Earth, Oregon State graduate Michael Thorburn is helping to build a radio telescope that is eavesdropping on the darkest secrets of the universe.
Since captivating the world with its acrobatic landing, the Mars rover Curiosity has fallen into a rhythm. Topping its to-do list in the new year: Set off toward a Martian mountain - a trek that will take up a good chunk of the year.
Results are in from the first test of Martian soil by the rover Curiosity: So far, there is no definitive evidence that the red planet has the chemical ingredients to support life.
A former computer specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was not dismissed because he advocated his belief in intelligent design while at work, a Superior Court judge has tentatively ruled.