The Mars Desert Research Station, located in the Utah desert near the town of Hanksville, is a simulated Mars habitat that serves as a testbed for field operations studies in preparation for future human missions to Mars.

Volunteer crews live at the station, testing habitat design features and technologies. From December 27 to January 2, six college students served as the MDRS crew, as participants in NASA's Spaceward Bound program.

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You’ve just landed on the Red Planet and are looking for a fresh start. Sure, that job selling respirators at the local space-hardware store sounds cozy, but it’s a dead-end career. Mars will be ripe with opportunity; you just have to figure out how to tap it. So here’s the secret: Go into construction. You’ll learn useful skills and be out on the surface, where the real action is. Explore the landscape on coffee breaks. All you need to do is stumble upon a nice deposit of precious material—like platinum or deuterium, a hydrogen isotope that could fuel fusion reactors—and you’ll have it made.

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NASA has begun bidding a planned goodbye to its Phoenix Mars Lander. The lander relies on solar panels and the sun's golden touch to reawaken it each day, but a dust storm has hastened the end in the face of the oncoming Martian winter.

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Buzz Aldrin is fondly remembered as the second man to ever step foot on the moon, after his more famous compatriot Neil Armstrong. The former astronaut, now 78, is back in the spotlight after proclaiming that, should the United States space program send a mission to Mars, those astronauts should be prepared to stay there.

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In a Mars exploration milestone, a laser remote sensing instrument on the Phoenix Mars lander has detected snow falling on the red planet. Data from the light detection and ranging (lidar) instrument—designed to gather information about interactions between the Martian atmosphere and ground surface—showed the snow falling from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft's landing site.

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By next fall, NASA plans to launch its biggest Red Planet rover yet, the $1.8-billion, SUV-size Mars Research Laboratory. Even though the MRL will be able to haul five times as much equipment as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are already on Mars, a group of Swedish researchers say that they could accomplish far more if accompanied by a squad of helper ’bots. Fredrik Bruhn, the CEO of Ångström Aerospace Corporation, and his colleagues have designed the small inflatable scouts to assist bigger, less mobile rovers in their hunt for signs of microbial life on Mars.

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It's becoming a familiar story: robots on the surface of Mars outlasting their expected lifespan. Take the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, for example. The rovers landed on Mars in 2004 and have performed so well that NASA has extended their mission activities five times in the past three years.

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These detailed views of the red planet were transmitted to Earth by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). After a 72-million-mile trek through space, the craft reached Mars in March 2006, delivering some of the most advanced technology ever sent to another world.

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Now that the glitches caused by the Martian soil's clumpy consistency have been shaken out, the Phoenix Lander has been able to cook up a few samples to test the soil composition. The preliminary results are surprising even to the chemists at work on the project: the soil is alkaline, and much more so than anyone expected. The analysis has found trace amounts of magnesium, sodium, potassium, and other elements similar to those in the soil on Earth. On first pass, Martian dirt appears to be non-toxic and laden with the basic nutrients necessary to support life.

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A couple of days ago, it was big news when ice was found on Mars. Now, an upcoming study in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta claims that the Martian environment was once wet enough to produce morning dew. This finding runs counter to the more widely accepted view that liquid water on Mars seeped up from the ground, rather than falling from the sky as precipitation.

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NASA spent $420 million to send the Phoenix Lander to Mars last year. Festooned with state-of-the-art detection equipment, the rover's task was to scour the red surface in search of elusive Martian ice. And today, the NASA mission finally did uncover some extraterrestrial frost, and it did it with its simplest tool, a shovel.

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For the past two weeks, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has been broadcasting a wealth of incredible images from its landing site in the Martian arctic. I've been refreshing the mission's raw photo stream obsessively—no little green men yet, just gorgeous panoramas and detailed closeups of the most foreign of all foreign lands. Being a bit of a camera geek, I was quite curious as to what kind of hardware was behind the action, and naturally, Phoenix has some pretty sweet gear on board to make it all possible.

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In the first ever instance of a spacecraft photographing the landing of another craft on Mars, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this incredible image of NASA's Phoenix Lander making its descent on Sunday. Phoenix landed successfully and has already begun transmitting images from its landing zone in Mars's northern polar region, where it will be conducting meteorological and geological surveys over the course of its three-month mission.

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Laser radar systems now being developed at Rochester Institute of Technology and MIT's famed Lincoln Lab could eventually generate ultra-detailed, three-dimensional maps of planets, comets, asteroids and moons. The scientists are developing a LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology that operates both in the optical and ultraviolet, and could deliver detailed information about atmospheric composition, plus air temperature and pressure, wind speed, and precise topological features of a planet or planetary body.

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