In the vast expanse of space exploration, robotic rovers have become our proxy explorers, navigating alien terrains and collecting invaluable data. Yet, despite their advanced designs and capabilities ...

MADISON — When a multimillion-dollar extraterrestrial vehicle gets stuck in soft sand or gravel — as did the Mars rover Spirit in 2009 — Earth-based engineers take over like a virtual tow truck, ...

Although humanity is getting better at sending robotic probes out into the Solar System to explore the places no human can tread, we're still very much on a learning curve. The first extraterrestrial ...

Spacecraft engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hope to land the Mars Curiosity rover closer to its target than originally planned, moving the “sky crane” touchdown about 4 mi. nearer ...

At the Robopalooza festival in the California desert, engineers are stress-testing space robots, which they say could someday build the infrastructure needed to settle the moon and beyond. People love ...

Edgar once designed science experiments for astronauts to perform. Now she'll be the astronaut performing them.

Use cases for smart materials in space exploration keep cropping up everywhere. They are used in everything from antenna ...

While the engineering for solar panel cleaning systems is feasible, their implementation on deep-space Mars missions is fundamentally constrained by the "resource box." The "resource box" encompasses ...