You don’t need wheels to explore Mars. After touching down in November, NASA’s InSight spacecraft will spread its solar panels, unfold a robotic arm … and stay put. Unlike the space agency’s rovers, InSight is a lander designed to study an entire planet from just one spot. This sedentary science allows InSight to detect geophysical…

NASA’s Curiosity rover could soon be drilling rocks on Mars again. Engineers have been working for the past year to restore the rover’s full drilling capabilities, which were hampered in 2016 due to a mechanical problem. Later this weekend, they’ll be adding percussion to a new technique already in use on Mars. This new technique is called Feed Extended…

Many of NASA’s most iconic spacecraft towered over the engineers who built them: think Voyagers 1 and 2, Cassini or Galileo—all large machines that could measure up to a school bus. But in the past two decades, mini-satellites called CubeSats have made space accessible to a new generation. These briefcase-sized boxes are more focused in…

NASA’s InSight lander looks a bit like an oversized crane game: when it lands on Mars this November, its robotic arm will be used to grasp and move objects on another planet for the first time. And like any crane game, practice makes it easier to capture the prize. Engineers and scientists have a replica of InSight…