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NASA's Perseverance rover may have uncovered hints of ancient Martian life, but China's Tianwen 3 mission could be the first ...

This photomontage shows tubes containing samples from Mars, as collected by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. The agency’s Mars Sample Return Program plans to bring these samples back to study them in ...

It turns out the space industry has a lot of ideas on how to improve NASA’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to collect and return samples from Mars. Seven of these proposals have caught the agency’s ...

Japan’s space agency JAXA has opened the space probe Hayabusa2’s recently-returned sample capsule and found that the mission did succeed in collecting material from the asteroid Ryugu. It also ...

Render of the Tianwen-2 near-Earth asteroid/comet orbiter spacecraft. Credit: CNSA HELSINKI — China will launch the Tianwen-2 mission to sample a near-Earth asteroid next year, an official with the ...

NASA has announced an overhaul to its plan to bring samples from Mars back to Earth. Agency officials have decided to scrap parts of their original plan to cut down on the difficulty and cost. Instead ...

Late last year, a spacecraft containing samples of 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu landed safely in the desert after a 1.2-billion mile journey. There was only one little problem: NASA couldn’t ...

NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey. In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule ...

The asteroid Ryugu contains some of the darkest and oldest material in the known solar system, according to a pair of preliminary analyses of samples collected from the space rock. The samples, only ...