The Athena lunar lander from Intuitive Machines has prematurely ended its mission after tipping onto its side shortly after touching down near the moon's south pole, failing to fully accomplish its planned water-searching objectives. From a report: Athena was expected to operate for about 10 days before powering down as lunar night fell over the spacecraft's landing site at Mons Mouton, a plateau that lies about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole. But photographs delivered by the lander before it powered down confirmed the vehicle is lying on its side. "With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge," the company said in a statement. "The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission."

Intuitive Machines, however, highlighted that, although Athena did not operate as intended, the lander was able to briefly operate and transmit data after touchdown. That made the mission the "southernmost lunar landing and surface operations ever achieved." Intuitive Machines also said that Athena was "able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA's PRIME-1 suite, before the lander's batteries depleted." PRIME-1, which includes a drill that was expected to dig into the lunar surface to hunt for water, was able to move, according to a statement from NASA that states the device "demonstrated the hardware's full range of motion in the harsh environment of space."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Many of us have been guilty of binning a mushy, overripe banana -- but now scientists say they have a solution with the launch of a genetically engineered non-browning banana. The product is the latest in a series of gene-edited fruits and vegetables designed to have a longer shelf life. Scientists say the technology is emerging as a powerful new weapon against food waste, which occurs globally on an epic scale. The banana, developed by Tropic, a biotech company based in Norwich, is said to remain fresh and yellow for 12 hours after being peeled and is less susceptible to turning brown when bumped during harvesting and transportation.

The company has also developed a slow-ripening banana that has been approved in several countries, which it plans to launch later in the year. Other research teams are working on lettuce that wilts more slowly, bruise-resistant apples and potatoes and identifying the genes that determine how quickly grapes and blueberries shrivel. [...] The company worked out how to disable a gene responsible for the production of an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, which causes browning. The same gene is silenced in Arctic apples, a genetically modified variety, which has been sold in the US since 2017, and blocking the production of polyphenol oxidase has been shown to work in tomatoes, melon, kiwifruits and mushrooms. In the bananas, Tropic made precise changes to existing genes without introducing foreign genetic material. The report notes that an estimated 33% of the produce that is harvested worldwide is never consumed due to the short shelf-life of many fruit and vegetable products. Bananas are among the most thrown-away foods, with some 5 billion bananas tossed in the U.S. each year.

PhD students trained in small research groups are more likely to remain in academia than those from larger labs, according to a comprehensive analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The study, which examined 1.5 million scientists and 1.8 million mentorships across chemistry, physics and neuroscience, found that trainees from large research groups had 38-48% lower "survival rates" in academia between the 1980s and 1995 compared to their small-group counterparts.

However, researchers from larger labs who do stay in academia tend to achieve greater career success, publishing papers with higher citation rates and more frequently ranking among the most-cited scientists.

The research team, led by social-data scientist Roberta Sinatra from the University of Copenhagen, discovered that successful large-group scientists typically published more first-author papers with their mentors as last authors, suggesting they received substantial attention despite the group size.

Intuitive Machines' Athena lander touched down near the lunar south pole Thursday but may have toppled during landing, jeopardizing its scientific mission. "We're trying to evaluate exactly what happened in that last bit," said Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines' chief technology officer. Data from an inertial measurement unit suggests the 15-foot robotic spacecraft is lying on its side.

The landing issues mirror problems faced by the company's Odysseus spacecraft last year, which also toppled after touchdown. Noisy data from laser altitude instruments likely contributed to the landing complications, officials said. CEO Steve Altemus reported the spacecraft isn't generating expected power, probably because its solar panels are improperly oriented. The company believes Athena landed somewhere on Mons Mouton, though outside the planned landing zone.

The $62.5 million NASA-contracted mission carries several payloads, including a drill to search for frozen water, three small rovers, and a rocket-powered hopping drone. NASA officials indicated some experiments might still function despite the lander's orientation. Intuitive Machines' stock fell 20% Thursday following reports of the spacecraft's problems.

UPDATE: Athena Spacecraft Declared Dead After Toppling Over On Moon

SpaceX's eighth Starship test flight ended in failure after losing control and breaking apart shortly after launch, sending debris over Florida. "Starship didn't make it quite as high or as far" as the attempt nearly two months ago," notes NPR. That attempt ended with an explosion that sent flaming debris raining down on the Turks and Caicos. From the report: This time, wreckage from the latest explosion was seen streaming from the skies over Florida. It was not immediately known whether the spacecraft's self-destruct system had kicked in to blow it up. The 403-foot rocket blasted off from Texas. SpaceX caught the first-stage booster back at the pad with giant mechanical arms, but engines on the spacecraft on top started shutting down as it streaked eastward for what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Contact was lost as the spacecraft went into an out-of-control spin.

Starship reached nearly 90 miles in altitude before trouble struck and before four mock satellites could be deployed. It was not immediately clear where it came down, but images of flaming debris were captured from Florida, including near Cape Canaveral, and posted online. The space-skimming flight was supposed to last an hour. "Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we have some practice at this now," SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot said from the launch site. SpaceX later confirmed that the spacecraft experienced "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" during the ascent engine firing. "Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses," the company said in a statement posted online. You can watch a recorded livestream of the launch on X.

NASA has begun shutting down science instruments aboard the twin Voyager spacecraft to extend their 47-year journey through interstellar space, officials said. Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem was deactivated on February 25, while Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument will be shut down on March 24. Both spacecraft will then operate with just three of their original ten science instruments.

The radioisotope power systems aboard the Voyagers lose approximately 4 watts annually, threatening to end their mission within months without intervention. "Electrical power is running low," said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd. "The Voyagers have been deep space rock stars since launch, and we want to keep it that way as long as possible." NASA engineers believe these measures could enable the probes to continue operating into the 2030s, far beyond their initial five-year design life.

Geoffrey.landis writes: Over the last three months of 2024, more than 800 cases of GPS interference were recorded in Lithuanian airspace. Estonia and Finland have also raised concerns, accusing Russia of deploying technology to jam satellite navigation signals near Nato's eastern flank.

A group of British scientists -- dubbed the "Time Lords" -- are working on a solution: to develop portable atomic clocks. By carrying a group of atoms cooled to -273C on the plane itself, rather than relying on an external signal, the technology can't be interfered with by jamming. But the problem is that the equipment is still too large to be used routinely on planes.

The UK Hub for Quantum Enabled Position Navigation and Timing (QEPNT) was set up last December by the government to shrink the devices on to a chip, making them robust enough for everyday life and affordable for everyone. Henry White, part of the team from BAE Systems that worked on the test flight, told BBC News that he thought the first application could be aboard ships, "where there's a bit more space".

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: On March 2, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost made history, becoming the first commercial lunar lander to successfully touchdown on the moon's surface. The groundbreaking lander is wasting no time in getting to work. According to NASA, the joint public-private mission has already successfully demonstrated the ability to use Earth-based GPS signals on the lunar surface, marking a major step ahead of future Artemis missions. Accurate and reliable navigation will be vital for future astronauts as they travel across the moon, but traditional GPS tools aren't much good when you're around 225,000 miles from Earth. One solution could be transmitting data from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to the lunar surface in order to autonomously measure time, velocity, and position. That's what mission engineers from NASA and the Italian Space Agency hoped to demonstrate through the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), one of the 10 projects packed aboard Blue Ghost. [...]

"On Earth we can use GNSS signals to navigate in everything from smartphones to airplanes," Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator for NASA's SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program, said in a statement. "Now, LuGRE shows us that we can successfully acquire and track GNSS signals at the Moon." LuGRE relied on two GNSS constellations, GPS and Galileo, which triangulate positioning based on dozens of medium Earth orbit satellites that provide real-time tracking data. It performed its navigational fix at approximately 2 a.m. EST on March 3, while about 225,000 miles from Earth. Blue Ghost's LuGRE system will continue collecting information over the next two weeks almost continuously while the lander's other tools begin their own experiments.

Australian company Cortical Labs has launched the CL1, the world's first commercial "biological computer" that merges human brain cells with silicon hardware to form adaptable, energy-efficient neural networks. New Atlas reports: Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical's CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon "chip" are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

"Today is the culmination of a vision that has powered Cortical Labs for almost six years," said Cortical founder and CEO Dr Hon Weng Chong. "We've enjoyed a series of critical breakthroughs in recent years, most notably our research in the journal Neuron, through which cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, and were provided with electrophysiological stimulation and recording to mimic the arcade game Pong. However, our long-term mission has been to democratize this technology, making it accessible to researchers without specialized hardware and software. The CL1 is the realization of that mission." He added that while this is a groundbreaking step forward, the full extent of the SBI system won't be seen until it's in users' hands.

"We're offering 'Wetware-as-a-Service' (WaaS)," he added -- customers will be able to buy the CL-1 biocomputer outright, or simply buy time on the chips, accessing them remotely to work with the cultured cell technology via the cloud. "This platform will enable the millions of researchers, innovators and big-thinkers around the world to turn the CL1's potential into tangible, real-word impact. We'll provide the platform and support for them to invest in R&D and drive new breakthroughs and research." These remarkable brain-cell biocomputers could revolutionize everything from drug discovery and clinical testing to how robotic "intelligence" is built, allowing unlimited personalization depending on need. The CL1, which will be widely available in the second half of 2025, is an enormous achievement for Cortical -- and as New Atlas saw recently with a visit to the company's Melbourne headquarters -- the potential here is much more far-reaching than Pong. [...]

EmagGeek shares a report: Scientists have genetically engineered mice with some key characteristics of an extinct animal that was far larger -- the woolly mammoth. This "woolly mouse" marks an important step toward achieving the researchers' ultimate goal -- bringing a woolly mammoth-like creature back from extinction, they say.

"For us, it's an incredibly big deal," says Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas company trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. The company announced the creation of the woolly mice Tuesday in a news release and posted a scientific paper online detailing the achievement. Scientists implanted genetically modified embryos in female lab mice that gave birth to the first of the woolly pups in October.

My editorial: One has to wonder why it is necessary or even a great idea to bring back species that nature long ago determined were a failure.

AmiMoJo shares a report: Europe's biggest battery storage project has entered commercial operation in Scotland [alternative source], promising to soak up surplus wind power and prevent turbines being paid to switch off.

Zenobe said the first phase of its project at Blackhillock, between Inverness and Aberdeen, was now live with capacity to store enough power to supply 200 megawatts of electricity for two hours. It is due to be expanded to 300 megawatts by next year, enough to supply 3.1 million homes, more than every household in Scotland.

The government's Clean Power 2030 action plan sets a target capacity of up to 27 gigawatts of batteries by 2030, a sixfold increase from the 4.5 gigawatts installed today. This huge expansion is seen as critical as Britain builds more renewable wind and solar power, since batteries can store surplus generation for use when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

China's highest court has called for a crack down on the activities of paper mills, businesses that churn out fraudulent or poor-quality manuscripts and sell authorships. Nature: Some researchers are cautiously optimistic that the court's guidance will help curb the use of these services, while others think the impact will be minimal. "This is the first time the supreme court has issued guidance on paper mills and on scientific fraud," says Wang Fei, who studies research-integrity policy at Dalian University of Technology in China.

Paper mills sell suspect research and authorships to researchers who want journal articles to burnish their CVs. They are a significant contributor to overall research misconduct, particularly in China. Last month, the Supreme People's Court published a set of guiding opinions on technology innovation. Among the list of 25 articles, one called for lower courts to crack down on 'paper industry chains,' and for research fraud to be severely punished. Further reading:
Research Reveals Data on Which Institutions Are Retraction Hotspots;
Paper Mills Have Flooded Science With 400,000 Fake Studies, Experts Warn.

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on the moon, making it the first private company to achieve a stable lunar landing without crashing. The craft is carrying various NASA-funded experiments, including a "vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface," reports the Associated Press. There's also "a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust -- a scourge for NASA's long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment." From the report: A half hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the sun's glare. The second shot included the home planet, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space. Blue Ghost -- named after a rare U.S. species of fireflies -- had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.5 meters) wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It's the third mission under NASA's commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.

Firefly's Ray Allensworth said the lander skipped over hazards including boulders to land safely. Allensworth said the team continued to analyze the data to figure out the lander's exact position, but all indications suggest it landed within the 328-foot (100-meter) target zone in Mare Crisium. The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

NASA used specialized Schlieren photography to capture an image of Boom Supersonic's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft breaking the sound barrier on February 10, 2025 and producing shock waves as it exceeded Mach 1. The flight produced no audible sonic boom, marking progress toward the goal of quiet supersonic travel. CNN reports: "This image makes the invisible visible," said Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, in a press release. In order to capture the Schlieren images, Boom chief test pilot Tristan "Geppetto" Brandenburg positioned XB-1 at an exact time in a precise location over the Mojave Desert.

As the aircraft flew in front of the sun, NASA's team documented the changing air speeds as speeds over Mach 1, the speed of sound (761.23 miles per hour or 1,225.1 kilometers per hour). The images were captured during ground telescopes with special filters that detect air distortions. You can view the photo here.

How confident are we about the safety of commercial space tourism? Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: It's one thing for Microsoft to boast that they dare to use Outlook instead of Gmail. But it took a whole other level of commitment for Jeff Bezos to join his brother Mark aboard Blue Origin's first passenger-carrying mission in July 2021.

So, while Bezos is unhesitant about sending himself and other celebrities and loved ones into space aboard Blue Origin, how confident are you about the current state of space travel safety?

If offered a free ride into space from Bezos's Blue Origin, or one of the other options like Virgin Galactic, Axiom Space, or Boeing's Starliner, would you accept or decline it?
Share your own thoughts and answers in the comments.

Would you accept a free ride into space?

Petawatt lasers have already allowed scientists to "manipulate materials in new ways, emulate the conditions inside planets, and even split atoms," reports Science magazine. "Now, accelerator physicists have matched that feat, producing petawatt pulses of electrons that could also have spectacular applications..." Described in a paper published Thursday in Physical Review Letters, the electron pulses last one-quadrillionth of a second but carry 100 kiloamps of current. "It's a supercool experiment," says Sergei Nagaitsev, an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the work. Richard D'Arcy, a plasma accelerator physicist at the University of Oxford, adds, "It's not just an experimental demonstration of something interesting, it's a steppingstone on the way to megaamp beams." If achievable, those even more powerful beams might begin to perform extraordinary feats such as ripping particles out of empty space, he says...

[A]mped-up lasers would open the way to, for example, probing chemical processes as they happen, says Sergei Nagaitsev [an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the experiment]. "These are the easy pickings." An ultraintense electron pulse could also be used to generate plasmas like those seen in astrophysics, such as the jets of matter and radiation that shoot out of certain stellar explosions at near-light-speed. Researchers need only fire the electron beam into the right target. "This is a fantastic relativistic drill," Ferrario says. "The interaction of this with matter could be very interesting."

Superintense electron bunches might someday even probe the nature of empty space. They produce a hugely intense electric field, so if one of them were to collide with an ultraintense laser pulse, which also contains a huge electric field, it would expose space to an incredibly strong electrical polarization, D'Arcy notes. If that field is strong enough, it should begin to rip particle-antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum, a phenomenon predicted by quantum physics but never observed. "You can access areas of particle physics that are inaccessible elsewhere," Darcy says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

Watch the "Blue Ghost" lunar lander attempt its moon landing.

The actual landing is scheduled to happen at 3:34 a.m. Eastern time, according to CNN, while "The first images from the mission should be delivered about a half hour after..." Success is not guaranteed... [B]roadly speaking, about half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure. Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO, told CNN in December that his company's experience building rockets has given him a high degree of confidence in Blue Ghost's propulsion systems. "We're using (reaction control system) thrusters that we've built, developed in-house, that are designed by the same people that design our rocket engines. That reduces risk," Kim said. "All that gives us high confidence when we have people that do rocket engines really, really well — some of the best in the world."
But the New York Times notes that Blue Ghost, built by Austin, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, is just one of three robotic spacecraft "in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon's surface." Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft's systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on February 13. The spacecraft's cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon's cratered surface...

On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. The two missions are separate, but Ispace, seeking a cheaper ride to space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload... Although Resilience launched at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.
The third lunar lander heading to the moon is Athena (from Intuitive Machines), which launched Thursday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, "marking the first time humanity has had three lunar landers en route to the Moon at the same time," according to a statement from the company. Space.com notes that "To date, just one private spacecraft has ever landed successfully on the moon — Intuitive Machines' Odysseus, which did so in February 2024." Athena launched with several other spacecraft last night, including Odin, a scouting probe built by the asteroid-mining company Astroforge, and NASA's water-hunting Lunar Trailblazer. Lunar Trailblazer is also moon-bound, though it's headed for orbit rather than the surface...

Hidden layers of rock below the surface of Mars "strongly suggest" the presence of an ancient ocean, according to an international team of scientists including researchers at Penn State.

From the university's announcement: The new research offers the clearest evidence yet that the planet once contained a significant body of water and a more habitable environment for life, according to Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geology at Penn State and co-author on the study. "We're finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas," Cardenas said. "We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand — a proper, vacation-style beach."

The Zhurong rover landed on Mars in 2021 in an area known as Utopia Planitia and sent back data on the geology of its surroundings in search of signs of ancient water or ice. Unlike other rovers, it came equipped with rover-penetrating radar, which allowed it to explore the planet's subsurface, using both low and high-frequency radar to penetrate the Martian soil and identify buried rock formations. By studying the underground sedimentary deposits, scientists are able to piece together a more complete picture of the red planet's history, Cardenas explained. When the team reviewed radar data, it revealed a similar layered structure to beaches on Earth: formations called "foreshore deposits" that slope downwards towards oceans and form when sediments are carried by tides and waves into a large body of water.

"This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water," Cardenas said. "When we look back at where the earliest life on Earth developed, it was in the interaction between oceans and land, so this is painting a picture of ancient habitable environments, capable of harboring conditions friendly toward microbial life." When the team compared the Martian data with radar images of coastal deposits on Earth, they found striking similarities, Cardenas said. The dip angles observed on Mars fell right within the range of those seen in coastal sedimentary deposits on Earth...

The study also provided new information on the evolution of the Martian environment, suggesting that a life-friendly warm and wet period spanned potentially tens of millions of years.
Mars "was evolving," Cardenas says in the announcement. "Rivers were flowing, sediment was moving, and land was being built and eroded.

"This type of sedimentary geology can tell us what the landscape looked like, how they evolved, and, importantly, help us identify where we would want to look for past life."

CNN notes that the research was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

San Francisco-based biotech startup Loyal says a drug it developed to increase dogs' lifespan "has passed a significant milestone on the way to regulatory approval," reports the Washington Post: The Food and Drug Administration certified the daily pill as having a "reasonable expectation of effectiveness" at extending senior dogs' lifespans. The regulator's Center for Veterinary Medicine still has to certify that the drug is safe and that Loyal can manufacture it at scale before vets can prescribe the pill to dogs 10 years or older that weigh 14 pounds or more. Loyal's CEO, Celine Halioua, estimates that the process should be complete by the end of 2025 and called the FDA's initial recognition "a key step" to extending dogs' lives...

In the past decade, a subculture of tech entrepreneurship has focused on helping people stave off death, hawking custom-made dietary supplements and $2,500 full-body MRIs and investing in the development of antiaging drugs, among many other efforts. According to data firm Pitchbook, about $900 million in venture capital has been poured into antiaging and longevity start-ups in the past 12 months. Loyal has raised more than $150 million in venture funding since its 2019 founding to develop lifespan-extending drugs initially focused on canines.

Launching veterinary drugs is in some ways easier than winning approval for human treatments. Because dogs and humans have evolved alongside one another, Halioua hopes to eventually apply her findings about pets to help prolong their owners' lives. "If we can successfully delay the onset and severity of age-related diseases in dogs, it's extremely compelling evidence that it will also do that in humans," Halioua said. The biological processes of aging unfold faster in dogs because they live such short lives, she said, helping researchers and entrepreneurs probe how they work.
"Loyal's pill is a result of research into how to mimic the life-extending benefit of caloric restriction without the appetite suppression," according to the article, "and without the need for an owner to restrict their dog's food.

"The drug aims to improve a dog's metabolic fitness, or the body's ability to convert nutrients into energy and regulate hormones, which declines in humans and canines with age..."

Chinese scientists are developing a lightweight Mars drone capable of both rolling on the ground and flying using contra-rotating coaxial rotors. Space.com reports: The air-ground dual-purpose unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) weighs only 10.6 ounces (300 grams), equivalent to the weight of an apple. The development team is at the School of Astronautics (SoA) of the Harbin Institute of Technology. Seen as showing promising potential in future Mars science work, the UAV can take off at any time, traverse obstacles, and boasts superb endurance, reports state-owned China Central Television (CCTV).

"On the ground, it mainly rolls by shifting its center of gravity," said Zhu Yimin, a Ph.D candidate at SoA. "In the air, it relies on a pair of contra-rotating coaxial rotors, controlled by a steering engine to adjust the forward direction, to control torque and force, ultimately achieving stable flight," Zhu told CCTV. The UAV work entails multiple models of air-ground dual-mode robots with different configurations, CCTV reports. These robots move by rolling close to the ground, which reduces energy consumption, and can achieve a flight endurance time of more than six times that of traditional drones of the same size.

According to Zhang Lixian, a professor within the SoA, the hope is that the aerial vehicle can show off its long endurance and observational abilities on Mars. "Our second goal is for such machines to be suitable for construction in many underground spaces and for exploring unknown underground spaces. We also need robotic means for inspection and environmental detection. We have now materialized all these functions," said Zhang. A video of the drone can be found here.