Posted by Recent news about Mars is, at this point, news about a fleet. As of mid-2026 the planet has two working rovers, one grounded helicopter, a crowd of orbiters that have all outlived their design lifetimes, a Chinese rover that stopped answering four years ago, and a sample-return campaign that turned into a budget argument. Landing on Mars is no longer the hard part. Deciding what to do with what the landers found is.
Most recent news about Mars arrives one press release at a time, one instrument at a time. What follows is the ledger behind them: where each mission stood in mid-2026, and which results are conclusions rather than open arguments.
Perseverance Went Up the Crater Wall
The Perseverance rover touched down on the floor of Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021. Orbital images had shown why that spot: the basin once held a lake, fed by a river that built a delta into it from the west. The rover spent three years on that story – the crater floor’s volcanic rocks, the delta front, the boulder-strewn channel of Neretva Vallis. In August 2024 it began climbing the crater rim, topped out at a rise the team named Lookout Hill that December, and spent 2025 on terrain older than the lake and much harder to read: Witch Hazel Hill, Krokodillen, Silver Mountain. Some of those rocks appear to be fragments of ancient crust, shattered and re-cemented by impacts more than 3.9 billion years ago.
The driving exists to serve the tubes. Perseverance carries 43 sealed titanium sample containers, 38 of them for rock, regolith and air, and has been filling them since September 2021. In December 2022 and January 2023 it laid ten out on the ground at Three Forks – a backup depot, in case the rover cannot hand its collection to whatever comes to fetch it.
Not everything up there makes sense. In March 2025 the rover met a rock at St. Pauls Bay studded with hundreds of dark millimetre spherules, and the team still cannot agree whether they came from volcanic ash, impact melt or percolating water. Nobody knows. It is in the queue.
The Rock With Leopard Spots
In July 2024, in the Bright Angel formation along Neretva Vallis, Perseverance found an arrowhead-shaped slab about a metre long: Cheyava Falls. The interest was in the markings: pale millimetre spots with dark rims, found by the rover’s PIXL instrument to be rich in iron and phosphorus, set in mudstone laced with organic carbon detected by SHERLOC. On Earth that combination – mud, organic matter, iron oxides reacting at low temperature – is the kind of chemistry certain microbes live off. The rover cored it, catalogued as Sapphire Canyon.
A peer-reviewed paper in Nature in September 2025 called the spots a potential biosignature, a narrower claim than it sounds. It means the features are consistent with biology and that the abiotic route – the same reactions running hotter, with nothing alive involved – has not been eliminated. Instruments the size of a shoebox cannot settle that; a laboratory on Earth could. Which drags the most interesting rock on Mars into a story that has nothing to do with geology.
The Tubes Are on Mars. The Ride Is Not.
Mars Sample Return was designed as three pieces: Perseverance filling tubes, a lander carrying a small rocket to throw them off the surface, and a European orbiter to catch the container and carry it home. In September 2023 an independent review board priced that plan at 8 to 11 billion dollars, with no samples reaching Earth before 2040. NASA stopped, asked industry and its own centres for something cheaper, and in January 2025 offered two options: a stripped-down sky crane like the one that delivered Curiosity and Perseverance, or a commercial heavy lander. Estimated cost 5.8 to 7.7 billion dollars, samples home somewhere in the 2030s, the choice deferred.
Then the White House budget request for fiscal 2026 proposed cancelling the programme outright, Congress pushed back, and that is where matters stood through mid-2026. Unresolved. China, meanwhile, says it intends to launch Tianwen-3 around 2028 and bring Martian material back in the early 2030s, from a site picked for biosignature potential rather than from Jezero. The cores Perseverance has sealed are the best-documented rocks anyone has ever collected off Earth, parked in a crater with no confirmed ride.
Seventy-Two Flights, Then a Broken Blade
Ingenuity was meant to fly five times in thirty days and prove a rotorcraft could get airborne in an atmosphere with roughly one percent of Earth’s surface pressure. It first hovered on 19 April 2021 and kept flying for almost three years, logging 72 flights, something like 17 kilometres of ground covered and a little over two hours in the air. Somewhere in there it was promoted from technology demonstration to scout, picking routes for the rover.
Flight 72, on 18 January 2024, ended with rotor blade damage on landing – the tips most likely struck the ground as the helicopter came down over bland, rippled sand its navigation system could not lock onto. NASA ended flight operations on 25 January 2024. Ingenuity kept logging weather and avionics data as a fixed station for as long as Perseverance stayed in radio range, and the rover has long since driven past it. What outlives the hardware is the point: powered flight on another planet is now a solved problem.
Curiosity Is Still Reading the Drying of Mars
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on 6 August 2012 and has driven more than 30 kilometres since, much of it uphill. The route up Mount Sharp is a stratigraphic climb – each layer sits on an older one, so the rover reads Martian environmental history roughly in order. In October 2022 it entered the sulfate-bearing unit: magnesium sulfate salts that record water leaving the system rather than filling it.
Three results from that stretch deserve separating out from the general flow of recent news about Mars. In May 2024, in the Gediz Vallis channel, a wheel cracked open a rock full of pure elemental sulfur crystals – a form nobody predicted there and nobody has explained. In March 2025 a paper in PNAS reported that the SAM instrument, re-analysing a mudstone drilled at Yellowknife Bay in 2013, had identified decane, undecane and dodecane: the largest organic molecules yet found on Mars, plausibly fragments of fatty acids, plausibly abiotic. In April 2025 a paper in Science described iron carbonate within the sulfate layers, meaning carbon dioxide from the ancient atmosphere was being locked into rock. That is a working part of the machinery by which Mars lost its air.
Since mid-2025 the Curiosity rover has been working the boxwork terrain: a web of hardened ridges kilometres across, spotted from orbit in the 2000s and thought to be mineral-filled fractures left by the last groundwater to move through the mountain. It may be the mission’s final major target. The plutonium power source has been fading for more than a decade, and the team now plans each sol around the energy budget.
The Orbiters Nobody Writes About
Every picture from the surface reaches Earth through a relay, and the relays are old. Mars Odyssey has been in orbit since October 2001. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrived in March 2006, and its HiRISE camera still resolves features a few tens of centimetres across – fine enough to spot a discarded parachute or a rover’s wheel tracks. Its mineral mapper, CRISM, ran out of coolant and was retired in 2023. The spacecraft’s job now is half surveillance, half switchboard.
The MAVEN mission, in orbit since 21 September 2014, was built to answer one question: where the atmosphere went. Its answer is that the solar wind still strips it away ion by ion, and that the loss ran far harder when the young Sun was more violent and Mars had already lost the global magnetic field that would have deflected it. During the solar storms of May 2024, MAVEN watched aurora glow across the whole planet – with no global field to funnel particles toward the poles, the entire sky lights up – while on the ground Curiosity’s radiation detector logged its biggest surge ever.
ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter, at Mars since October 2016, produced the most useful negative result in the field. Curiosity keeps measuring methane inside Gale Crater at a fraction of a part per billion, with seasonal swings and the odd spike. TGO, staring through the whole atmospheric column with far more sensitive spectrometers, sees essentially none. Both are probably correct, which means something near the surface traps or destroys the gas, and a decade on nobody has closed the case. Mars Express, orbiting since December 2003, left a comparable knot: bright radar reflections under the south polar cap, published in 2018 as a subsurface lake, since matched nearly as well by clays and frozen brines.
China’s Zhurong rover landed in Utopia Planitia on 15 May 2021 and drove 1,921 metres before entering planned hibernation for the Martian winter in May 2022. It never woke, most likely because of dust on its solar panels; MRO images in 2023 showed it where it had stopped. Its radar had already profiled layered deposits tens of metres down, consistent with repeated flooding or ice.
None of this adds up to life on Mars, and nobody running these missions pretends otherwise. Jezero and Gale were habitable places; whether anything ever took up the offer is still unknown. If you would rather follow this fleet steadily than in press-release spikes, SETIworld tracks the missions sample by sample, and the arguing happens in the open. Pull up a chair.
