The origin of life is one of the most fundamental and enduring questions of mankind and one of the three greatest Origin Questions in the natural sciences.  Recently, China has officially launched its Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, Tianwen-3, marking a significant step forward in planetary exploration. The mission aims to bring Martian samples back to Earth, where advanced laboratory instruments will be employed to conduct comprehensive analyses, seeking to determine whether life ever existed—or may still exist—on Mars. Professor Yiliang LI, an astrobiologist from the Department of Earth Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), serves as a core member of the Tianwen-3 scientific team and a co-author of a recently published perspective article in Nature Astronomy outlining the mission’s objectives. His role mainly involves leading an HKU group that is working on the selection of the landing site for the Tianwen-3 MSR mission.

A team of students from the University of Surrey, the University of Portsmouth and the University of Southampton are working to fit equipment they designed, made and tested to a suborbital launch vehicle which aims to launch 900km into space.

If humans are ever going to live beyond Earth, they’ll need to construct habitats. But transporting enough industrial material to create livable spaces would be incredibly challenging and expensive. Harvard researchers think there's a better way, through biology. 

An international team of researchers led by Robin Wordsworth have demonstrated that they can grow green algae inside shelters made out of bioplastics in Mars-like conditions. The experiments are a first step toward designing sustainable habitats in space that won’t require bringing materials from Earth.

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Scientists with NASA’s Lucy mission continue to analyze data collected during the spacecraft’s April 20 encounter with the main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson.

Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.

This is the first-ever evidence for a ‘planet with a death wish’. Though it was theorised to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.