Mars: The new space race

For nine months, a group of Swiss primary school children eagerly prepared for their ‘mission to Mars’. And then came the all-clear for lift-off to a remote ‘Mars space station’ in western Switzerland for a three-day mission carrying out experiments similar to those conducted by real astronauts.

NASA has carried out the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity was able to lift, rotate, and land. More complicated tests are planned in the coming weeks.

"We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet!" says lead engineer MiMi Aung to her team as NASA successfully flew the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.

The conversion could pave the way to sustaining human life on Mars. It marks the first time that a resource was extracted from another planet for use by humans.

Months after the delivery of half a million Astrazeneca vaccines, Ivory Coast is still struggling to get people into vaccination centres after suspicion and unfounded rumours have fuelled fears about getting the jab. And around 150,000 Burundian refugees are staying at camps in Tanzania after fleeing the violent political unrest in their homeland that began in 2015. Dodoma is trying to send them back, but many fear the country remains unsafe. Finally, South African film “My Octopus Teacher” schools its rivals and is named “Best Documentary” at the Oscars.

Ingenuity, the first ever human-built aircraft to fly on another planet, has gotten a reprieve after successfully completing four out of five planned flights.

China's Mars rover "Zhurong" drives from its landing platform and starts exploring the surface, making the country only the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet.

China's National Space Administration (CNSA) on Sunday released new images from its Tianwen-1 Mars probe. The footage shows the rover opening a parachute and descending to the Martian surface, and its rover Zhurong driving away from its landing platform and moving over the surface of the Red Planet. The launch on July 2020 of the Tianwen-1 Mars probe, which carried the Zhurong rover, marked a major milestone in China's space programme. In the future, the rover will continue to carry out movement, perception, and scientific exploration of Mars, the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

The 70-year-old British billionaire reached space nine days before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' planned flight. But Bezos' company said Branson was simply not flying high enough.

The Perseverance rover is on a mission to hunt for signs of past life on Mars. But something went wrong in its first attempt to gather rock samples.

NASA's Perseverance rover succeeded on its second try to scoop up rocks on Mars. While the first effort failed, this second attempt has excited Earth-based scientists.

For the final episode of our series on the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago, we take you where a significant part of the public relations war between the US and USSR took place: outer space. James André, Sylvain Rousseau and Achraf Abid have delved into the video archives, and interviewed astronauts and experts to find out how the Russian space agency has evolved over the past three decades.