Tuesday, October 06
NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover has been roaming the surface of Mars for four years, drilling into the alien soil to collect dirt it places in tubes and leaves on the ground.Engineers designed Perseverance to be the first step in the agency’s exploration of the Red Planet. In the future, more robotic spacecraft would arrive to sweep up the capsules and rocket them back to Earth, where scientists could look for signs that Mars once was, or is, a world with life.The wait for answers may be about to get longer. President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration would cancel the planned follow-on mission, potentially abandoning the tubes for decades to Martian dust storms.The White House is calling for a roughly 50% cut to NASA’s
