NASA says some of the rover's instruments will still find their way to the Moon.
The lander does use essentially the same shield, but its equipment has been double-checked.
Right now, scientists only have two options for analyzing Martian material directly, and both have serious downsides.
Satellites have collided only four times in the past 30 years, making it difficult to form generalizations about cause.
The new experiment relied on a cannon that can shoot marbles at speeds of more than 11,000 miles per hour.
Scientists now believe humans stalked and then confronted a giant ground sloth thousands of years ago in New Mexico.
Wall-E and Eva were nicknamed in honor of characters from the Pixar film, thanks to the scene in which Wall-E uses a fire extinguisher to dance through space, which mimics how these two real spacecraft will move.
Stronger gravity requires stronger—and pricier—rockets to overcome.
"You haven't lived until you've put your arms around a mammoth femur trying to measure it," Smith said.
Scientists may have been thinking about moons formed by impacts across the solar system in the wrong way.
Early dinosaurs were at the mercy of weather patterns unfolding across the supercontinent Pangaea.
There are about 400 subglacial lakes around the world, but these are the first scientists believe to be salty.
Scientists are excited about the prospect the mission holds for new discoveries, but if you're just learning about the mission now, here's what you need to know.
"Mercury is just so weird and so exotic compared to the Moon and other terrestrial planets," Kathleen Vander Kaaden, a planetary scientist at the engineering company Jacobs Engineering Group working on a contract at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas, told Newsweek.
"I think people didn't really think about [phosphorus]" in comparison to ingredients like carbon and water, Greaves told Newsweek. "It's kind of a nice opportunity to go, 'Look, this matters and it's not super hard.'"
"It's just completely bizarre that we should have two planets the same size but opposite ends of the habitability spectrum."