Synthetic organisms engineered to use carbon dioxide as a raw material could help humans settle Mars one day, a prominent biologist says.

A study conducted by Gregory Matioff, an adjunct professor of physics at the New York City College of Technology, suggests the best way to travel to Mars might be to hitch a ride on a passing asteroid.

NASA is nervous about sending astronauts to Mars because exposure to the wind of high-energy particles streaming from the sun could indeed prove deadly. But a team of researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Oxford, UK, have shown that a magnet no wider than your thumb can deflect a stream of charged particles like those in the solar wind. It gives new life to an old idea about shielding spacecraft, and might just usher in a new era of space travel.

Future manned missions to the moon or Mars could use plants as bio-harvesters to extract valuable elements from the alien soils, researchers say.

Solar storms unleashed by the sun's activity may threaten future Mars colonies in addition to Earth. Now NASA is investing in a forecasting system that may someday give up to three days advance warning of space weather events.

Researchers have proposed a new project for analyzing Martian soil samples -- the "Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes" based on the theory that life on Mars – if there is any – may be composed of "island species" that were carried away from Earth on interplanetary meteorites.

Russia should build a new nuclear-powered spaceship for prospective manned missions to Mars and other planets, the nation's space chief said Thursday.

Researchers have successfully passed the 200-kilowatt threshold for a magnetoplasma rocket, raising hopes for a 10- to 20-megawatt engine that could propel human missions to Mars in just 39 days as opposed to conventional rockets that could take six months or more.

US ambitions for manned space exploration have hit a major hurdle in the wake of severe budget constraints, according to preliminary findings of a panel appointed by President Barack Obama.

Have Mars landers been destroying signs of life? Instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA's robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake. New methods are proposed that would be able to detect organic material at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion without risking overheating the samples.