June 2nd - on this day in 2003, a Starsem Soyuz FG/Fregat rocket launched ESA - European Space Agency's first planetary mission, Mars Express, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The 1,123 kg spacecraft also included the 33 kg Beagle 2 lander. Mars Express's orbital insertion around the red planet occurred on Christmas Day, 2003, with Beagle 2 landing the same day. Contact with Beagle 2 could not be established, so it was assumed the lander crashed. In 2015, however, high-resolution phot

What you are seeing on the Mars surface is not a UFO or alien drone. It is NASA’s Mars helicopter called Ingenuity. Ingenuity arrived on Mars with the Perseverance rover in 2021. Its mission was to: Test powered flight on another planet Take aerial images of the Martian surface Help rovers choose safe paths Mars has very thin air, so Ingenuity uses fast-spinning blades to fly. It became the first aircraft to fly on another planet in history. Ingenuity proved that flight on Mars is possible, open