On Racetrack Playa, stones heavy enough to need two hands leave grooves in the dried mud as if they walk. A weather station, fifteen GPS-fitted rocks and a set of time-lapse cameras finally recorded the cause, and it was almost nothing: a few millimeters of w…
Before SpaceX existed, Elon Musk spent late 2001 trying to buy refurbished Soviet missiles in Moscow to land a minibar-sized greenhouse on Mars. The plan, called Mars Oasis, was designed not to do science but to broadcast a single image — a green shoot agains…