NASA's Perseverance rover may have uncovered hints of ancient Martian life, but China's Tianwen 3 mission could be the first to deliver samples back to Earth.

China’s first Mars rover, Zhurong, with its Tianwen-1 landing platform, which touched down on the Red Planet in May 2021. The mission’s success aided China’s development of the more ambitious ...

While NASA's Mars Sample Return initiative is in political hot water, China is moving ahead on plotting out its rendezvous with the Red Planet. China's roadmap for a Mars Sample Return mission to be ...

It is a hot debate bracketed by cold hard facts: What are the best methods for handling Mars samples here on Earth? Planetary protection is a measure to safeguard our world from any contamination that ...

China launched a spacecraft that promises to return samples from an asteroid near Mars and yield “groundbreaking discoveries and expand humanity’s knowledge of the cosmos," the country's space agency ...