The Ingenuity helicopter may be the first vehicle ever to fly on Mars, but Mars was not the first place it has ever flown. Before packaging it up and blasting it to the Red Planet, engineers at JPL gave the helicopter a trial run in a special wind tunnel designed with help from researchers at Caltech.

To simulate flying on a planet where the atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth's, a custom wind tunnel was built inside of an 85-foot-tall, 25-foot-diameter vacuum chamber at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. Pressure in the chamber was pumped down to approximate the Martian atmosphere, while an array of 441 pairs of individually controllable fans blew on the helicopter to simulate forward flight in the enclosed space.

The fan array was designed and built by JPL engineers with input from Caltech's Chris Dougherty and Marcel Veismann, who are currently Ph.D. students working with Mory Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering and Booth-Kresa Leadership Chair of Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST). Dougherty and Veismann had previously overseen design and assemblage of a similar array of 1,296 pairs of fans for the Real Weather Wind Tunnel at CAST, which opened in 2017.

A "super full moon" is coming on April 27, 2021, and coastal cities like Miami know that means one thing: a heightened risk of tidal flooding.

Exceptionally high tides are common when the moon is closest to the Earth, known as perigee, and when it's either full or new.

The expanding shell of gas and dust that surrounds the star is about five light-years wide, which equals the distance from here to the nearest star beyond the Sun, Proxima Centauri.

The huge structure was created from one or more giant eruptions about 10,000 years ago. The star's outer layers were blown into space—like a boiling teapot popping off its lid.

Crew members who took part in the Mars500 experiment showed significant changes in their gut microbiota from their 520 days in confinement, according to a new study by scientists at Université de Montreal and McGill University.

The study, published today in the Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal and funded by the Canadian Space Agency, analyzed data from fecal samples of six crew members from Russia, Europe and China.

The crew lived in a completely sealed habitat in Moscow from June 2010 to November 2011 to simulate a manned mission to Mars, which international space agencies hope to make in the 2030s. Their confinement was the longest ever conducted with humans under controlled conditions.

The goal: to test the impact of living cut off from the world on the physiological and psychological health. In the end, all six crew members emerged with major alterations in their body mass, muscle strength and other indicators, previous studies have shown.

The discovery of microbiome alterations represents a missing link between these symptoms and deepens scientists' understanding of how well astronauts will be able to work in and recover from long-duration spaceflight, as well as how humans generally interact with their habitats.