Terri Randall

Follow along as NASA launches the Mars 2020 Mission, perhaps the most ambitious hunt yet for signs of ancient life on Mars. In February 2021, the spacecraft blazes into the Martian atmosphere at some 12,000 miles per hour and lowers the Perseverance Rover into the rocky Jezero Crater, home to a dried-up river delta scientists think could have harbored life. Perseverance will comb the area for signs of life and collect samples for possible return to...

If spacecraft OSIRIS-REx can grab a piece of an asteroid and bring it to Earth, scientists could gain insight into our planet's origins—and even how to defend against rogue asteroids. But NASA only gets three shots at collecting a sample.

Join scientists as they use NASA’s brand new James Webb Space Telescope to peer deep in time to hunt for the first stars and galaxies in our universe, and try to detect the fingerprints of life in the atmospheres of distant worlds.

As the Dead Sea shrinks, engineers prepare a daring solution: connect it with the Red Sea by way of a massive desalination plant. If it works, it could stabilize the lake and ease regional tensions, but will it put the environment at risk?

What makes a person walk into a theater or a church or a classroom full of students and open fire? What combination of circumstances compels a human being to commit the most inhuman of crimes? Can science in any way help us understand these horrific events and provide any clues as to how to prevent them in the future? As the nation tries to understand the tragic events at Newtown, NOVA correspondent Miles O’Brien separates fact from fiction, investigating...

Over 60,000 years ago, the first modern humans—people physically identical to us today—left their African homeland and entered Europe, then a bleak and inhospitable continent in the grip of the Ice Age. But when they arrived, they were not alone: the stocky, powerfully built Neanderthals had already been living there for hundred of thousands of years. So what happened when the first modern humans encountered the Neanderthals? Did we make love...

3,600-year-old reliefs in Egyptian tombs and temples depict pharaohs and warriors proudly riding into battle on horse-drawn chariots. Some historians claim that the chariot launched a technological and strategic revolution, and was the secret weapon behind Egypt's greatest era of conquest known as the New Kingdom. But was the Egyptian chariot really a revolutionary design? How decisive a role did it play in the bloody battles of the ancient world?...