An image of the Mars Perseverance rover released by NASA on February 24, 2021, has been altered and shared in online posts saying a fly was spotted on the vehicle and suggesting that NASA is faking Mars exploration with videos shot on a Canadian Arctic island instead.

NASA's first two crewed Artemis moon missions have been pushed back to 2026 and 2027, respectively, and the move could have big ramifications for the agency's Artemis program and competition with China for leadership in space.

NASA's Perseverance rover has spotted an oddball rock in an ancient river channel on Mars. Deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan explains. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

Relying on remote data, including photographs taken after the flight, the investigators believe that “navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” which most likely resulted in Ingenuity experiencing a “hard impact on the sand ripple’s slope,” causing it to pitch and roll.

HUMANS have already reached the Moon – and Mars seems like the obvious next step. But how will we get there? There are several mega-rockets already being developed that could take us to the red

The recent images taken by MRO show the solar panels have acquired the same reddish-brown hue as the rest of the planet. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California used the photos to estimate the amount of dust that had accumulated, which will help prepare for future missions.

"When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don't have any black boxes!" NASA's Håvard Grip said.

"She still has one final gift for us, which is that she's now going to continue on as a weather station of sorts."

The transition team has been grappling with an agency that has a superfluity of field centers—ten spread across the United States, as well as a formal headquarters in Washington, DC—and large, slow-moving programs that cost a lot of money and have been slow to deliver results.

Imagine how much more difficult it would be to diagnose a helicopter accident that took place 69 million miles away with none of the usual data present to help. NASA had to do just that after its Ingenuity Mars Helicopter suffered an accident on Jan.

Scientists have long known the hazards of dust devils churning up Martian dirt, though dust devils can also blow accumulating dirt off of solar panels. About 12 years ago, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught sight of an extraordinary one with a plume stretching 12 miles into the sky.

Space missions to the moon, Mars and beyond often get the most attention, but NASA's Near Space Network does a lot of heavy lifting for humankind's reach for the stars.