With its impeccable landing on Thursday, NASA's Perseverance became the fifth rover to reach Mars—so when can we finally expect the long-held goal of a crewed expedition to materialize?

NASA's current Artemis program is billed as a "Moon to Mars" mission, and acting administrator Steve Jurczyk has reiterated his aspiration of "the mid-to-end of the 2030s" for American boots on the Red Planet.

But while the trip is technologically almost within grasp, experts say it's probably still decades out because of funding uncertainties.

The world got its first close-up look at a Mars landing on Friday, as NASA released a stunning picture of its newest rover being lowered onto the dusty red surface.

The photo was released less than 24 hours after the Perseverance rover successfully touched down near an ancient river delta, where it will search for signs of ancient life and set aside the most promising rock samples for return to Earth in a decade.

NASA equipped the spacecraft with a record 25 cameras and two microphones, many of which were turned on during Thursday's descent.

The rover is shown in extraordinary detail just 6 1/2 feet (2 meters) off the ground, being lowered by cables attached to an overhead sky crane, the red dust kicked up by rocket engines.

The U.S. Space Force has a serious role to play in the modern world. Its stated mission is to train and equip personnel to defend U.S. interests in space. Given the increasing military and economic importance of space, the USSF is likely to grow in importance.

But a quick internet search shows that for most people, the Space Force is more a meme than a military branch. It has been the subject of jokes on "Saturday Night Live," and Netflix was working on a comedy show before the service was officially formed.

"I'm safe on Mars" isn't a tweet you see every day.

It's the update provided by the Twitter account for NASA's Perseverance rover (@NASAPersevere) after it successfully landed Thursday on the Red Planet. The tweet went out to a rapidly-growing audience of more than 1.2 million followers, with promises of more to come in the future.

The tweet, which gathered more than 480,000 likes as of Thursday night, punctuated a 300-million-mile voyage and coincided with the rover's 3:55 p.m. EST landing. "Perseverance will get you anywhere," indeed.

The University of Adelaide is sending pills to the International Space Station (ISS) to determine if it will be possible to produce medicine in space to enable longer-term space missions.

Scheduled to launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Sunday 21 February, the pills will contain Ibuprofen and vitamin C as active ingredients, in addition to excipients that can be found on the moon's surface. These include silica, magnesium silicate (talcum) and calcium phosphate.

University of Adelaide professor and research director for Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources Volker Hessel said the project was making the first step towards "autonomous on-board pharmaceutical manufacturing."

The 60 pills will be packaged in blister packs and will be placed outside the ISS for six months to discover how exposure to microgravity and space radiation affects the stability of pharmaceutical tablet formulations.

"Radiation protection was incorporated into the design of the pills," Hessel said.

"By altering the interaction between the ingredients and the drug we will be able to examine how these variations affect their stability."

Space technology companies Alpha Space and Space Tango have partnered with the University of Adelaide to send the pills to space.

A highly unusual object was spotted traveling through the solar system in 2017. Given a Hawaiian name,ʻOumuamua, it was small and elongated—a few hundred meters by a few tens of meters, traveling at a speed fast enough to escape the Sun's gravity and move into interstellar space.

I was at a meeting when the discovery of ʻOumuamua was announced, and a friend immediately said to me, "So how long before somebody claims it's a spaceship?" It seems that whenever astronomers discover anything unusual, somebody claims it must be aliens.

Nearly all scientists believe that ʻOumuamua probably originates from outside the solar system. It is an asteroid- or comet-like object that has left another star and traveled through interstellar space—we saw it as it zipped by us. But not everyone agrees. Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor of astronomy, suggested in a recent book that it is indeed an alien spaceship.

If experiments done in small bottles in a University of Oregon lab are accurate, the friction of colliding Martian dust particles are unlikely to generate big electrical storms or threaten the newly arrived exploration vehicles or, eventually, human visitors.

For 50 years since Viking landers and later orbiters detected silts, clays, wind-blown bedforms and dust devils on Mars, scientists have worried about the potential for large lightning storms and whether static electricity generated by the planet's mostly basaltic rock particles could damage vehicles or human protective gear.

In the journal Icarus, a UO team reports that the friction caused by dust particles making contact with each other may indeed produce electrical discharges at the surface and in the planet's atmosphere, but any resulting sparks are likely to be small.

Such concerns had resurfaced in relation to the new NASA Mars mission, which successfully put the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity robotic helicopter on the red planet Feb. 18.

In the lab of volcanologist Josef Dufek, researchers used a vertical glass tube comparable in size to a water bottle measuring some 4 inches in diameter and 8 inches in length.