Astronauts are heading back to the moon, and this time they are focusing on establishing the first long-term presence. Afterward, NASA has its sights set on a trip to Mars.

With these long-duration missions ahead, new challenges will have to be accounted for on every front. The moon is about 238,855 miles from Earth, but a trip to Mars for an astronaut means traveling around 140 million miles away and leaving our planet for about three years. Because of this distance, astronauts will also face up to a 20-minute communication delay from Earth to Mars.

After 30 years in orbit, mission operations for the joint NASA-JAXA Geotail spacecraft have ended, after the failure of the spacecraft's remaining data recorder.

After its launch on July 24, 1992, Geotail orbited Earth, gathering an immense dataset on the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere, Earth's protective magnetic bubble. Geotail was originally slated for a four-year run, but the mission was extended several times due to its high-quality data return, which contributed to over a thousand scientific publications.

While one of Geotail's two data recorders failed in 2012, the second continued to work until experiencing an anomaly on June 28, 2022. After attempts to remotely repair the recorder failed, the mission operations were ended on November 28, 2022.

"Geotail has been a very productive satellite, and it was the first joint NASA-JAXA mission," said Don Fairfield, emeritus space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and NASA's first project scientist for Geotail until his retirement in 2008.

Perseverance is a NASA autonomous vehicle that arrived at the Jezero Crater (the bed of an ancient, now dried-up lake on Mars) on February 18, 2021. The rover is equipped with seven novel, complex scientific instruments dedicated to exploring the planet's surface in search of signs of possible past life, collecting and depositing samples to be brought back to Earth, testing new technologies for use in human exploration, and studying the planet's atmosphere in detail.

With regard to the aim of studying the atmosphere, the MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer) instrument has been obtaining novel results. MEDA's lead researcher is José Antonio Rodríguez-Manfredi of the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB) in Madrid, and it has had the participation of a team from the UPV/EHU's Planetary Sciences Research Group. The instrument comprises a set of sensors that measure temperature, pressure, wind, humidity and properties of the dust that is always present in suspension in the Mars atmosphere.