NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed that movement in sand dune fields on the Red Planet occurs on a surprisingly large scale, about the same as in dune fields on Earth. This is unexpected because Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, is only about one percent as dense, and its high-speed winds are… [Read more…]
April 28, 2012
The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, launched Nov. 26, 2011, will deliver Curiosity to the surface of Mars on the evening of Aug. 5, 2012, PDT (early on Aug. 6, Universal Time and EDT) to begin a two-year prime mission. Curiosity’s landing site is near the base of a mountain inside Gale Crater, near the Martian… [Read more…]
April 13, 2012
Getting a spacecraft to Mars is one thing; getting it safely to the ground is a whole other challenge! This 60-second video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains three ways to land on the surface of the Red Planet http://youtu.be/8-X8acD_r38
April 12, 2012
Researchers from universities in Los Angeles, California, Tempe, Arizona and Siena, Italy have published a paper in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences (IJASS) citing the results of their work with data obtained by NASA’s Viking mission. The twin Viking 1 and 2 landers, which launched in August and September of 1975, successfully… [Read more…]
February 5, 2012
… but it could be lurking in the depths Scientists have virtually ruled out the possibility of life on Mars having revealed the planet experienced a 600 year water drought. Samples of soil found that the surface had been starved of any moisture that might enhance the view that there are living organisms on the… [Read more…]
January 25, 2012
(False Color) This mosaic of images taken in mid-January 2012 shows the windswept vista northward (left) to northeastward (right) from the location where NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is spending its fifth Martian winter, an outcrop informally named “Greeley Haven.” Opportunity’s Panoramic Camera (Pancam) took the component images as part of full-circle view being assembled… [Read more…]
November 30, 2011
By Ted Greenwald - www.wired.com Eminent physicist Paul Davies has a proposal for you: a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. As it’s typically conceived, a round-trip Mars mission would take about two years and cost at least $80 billion. But you could cut 80 percent of the expense, Davies says, by nixing the return and… [Read more…]
November 30, 2011
BY STEPHEN CLARK SPACEFLIGHT NOW Plagued by an undiagnosed problem that stranded it in Earth orbit, Russia’s Phobos-Grunt Mars mission remained quiet Tuesday after renewed attempts to coax the craft back into contact with ground controllers. European Space Agency officials transmitted signals to raise Phobos-Grunt’s orbit Tuesday in hopes it would allow greater communications opportunities… [Read more…]
November 29, 2011
Light on Mars? Curiosity rover to fire ‘million bulb torch’ at planet’s surface to see if it’s habitable The Mars lander will fire a laser beam with the energy of a million lightbulbs at the surface of the red planet to see whether or not it could have supported life. The international team of space… [Read more…]
November 26, 2011
NASA began a historic voyage to Mars with the Nov. 26 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, which carries a car-sized rover named Curiosity. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V rocket occurred at 10:02 a.m. EST (7:02 a.m. PST). http://youtu.be/qmJO449R_5g “We are very excited about sending the world’s most advanced… [Read more…]
November 25, 2011
Watch live streaming video from spaceflightnow at livestream.com http://youtu.be/P4boyXQuUIw Mars rover Curiosity poised for Nasa’s ‘most ambitious’ mission to planet The rover, part of the Mars Science Laboratory, will probe the Red Planet’s secrets with a wide array of scientific instruments Richard Luscombe A vehicle the size of a small 4×4,is about to embark on a one-way 350m-mile trip… [Read more…]
November 18, 2011
Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
November 2, 2011
Six-strong ESA team end ordeal of boredom and cultural barriers in 18-month simulated Mars mission at Moscow research centre Ian Sample and Miriam Elder The six-strong crew of the European Space Agency’s most gruelling mission yet will emerge from their capsule on Friday afternoon after an 18-month voyage that went, literally, nowhere. The would-be spacefarers… [Read more…]
November 1, 2011
This image, which combines orbital imagery with 3-D modeling, shows flows that appear in spring and summer on a slope inside Mars’ Newton Crater. Sequences of observations recording the seasonal changes at this site and a few others with similar flows might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today. Evidence for that… [Read more…]
September 21, 2011
A team of scientists at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, have drawn attention to a couple of small mineral-rich depressions on Mars that, perhaps relatively recently in the red planet’s history, could have been places for life. The troughs were discovered at Noctis Labyrintus, also known as ‘the labyrinth of the night’ –… [Read more…]
September 3, 2011
On the floor of Eberswalde crater, winding channels once fed water into a lake, depositing a fan of dark sediment that covers 115 square kilometres. The structure was discovered in 2002 images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, and appears here in a new colour photograph from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite. The feature… [Read more…]
August 23, 2011
Lava, not water, may have carved the biggest channels on Mars. Ever since NASA’s Mariner 9 spacecraft beamed back the first images of the channels in the 1970s, most people have assumed they were created by massive floods. But David Leverington of Texas Tech University in Lubbock says flowing water would have left behind much more sediment… [Read more…]
August 9, 2011
Finish line in sight for Opportunity after three-year journey Endeavour crater is a 14mile-wide depression near the Martian equator It is likely to be the rover’s final destination Months after the death of the Mars rover Spirit, its surviving twin is poised to reach the rim of a vast crater to begin a fresh round… [Read more…]
July 29, 2011
This oblique view of the lower mound in Gale Crater shows layers of rock that preserve a record of environments on Mars. Here, orbiting instruments have detected signatures of both clay minerals and sulfate salts, with more clay minerals apparent in the foreground of this image and fewer in higher layers. This change in mineralogy… [Read more…]
July 23, 2011
NASA’s next Mars rover — the ambitious, beleaguered, delayed Mars Science Laboratory — finally has a destination. Mission scientists announced Friday that the rover, a nuclear-powered vehicle the size of a small S.U.V., would head to Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide depression near the Martian equator. What attracted them there is a mountain that rises upward… [Read more…]
July 22, 2011
SNOWSTORMS more violent than any on Earth may have hit Mars – and could occasionally strike again, despite its extremely dry climate. No rain or snowstorms have ever been observed on Mars, which has been mostly cold and dry for about 3.5 billion years. But mineral evidence suggests short-lived lakes have formed intermittently on the… [Read more…]
July 20, 2011
http://www.space.com/12349-mars-eyes-spirit-montage.html
July 19, 2011
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to record this view in the eastward driving direction after completing a drive on July 17, 2011, that took the rover’s total driving distance on Mars beyond 20 miles. Opportunity drove 407 feet (124 meters) during the 2,658th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s exploration… [Read more…]
June 25, 2011
Officials at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, have just released a new video, depicting how the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity will reach and explore the Red Planet. The video shows the orbital maneuvers that the MSL and its related components will perform when they reach Earth orbit, and how the vehicle… [Read more…]
June 8, 2011
Humans have been seeing strange things on the surface of Mars for centuries. From the 1700s up through the present day, widespread fame has been available to anyone able to produce even the slightest bit of flimsy evidence that there’s Martian life. The most recent example was this week’s supposed revelation that a secret Mars base,… [Read more…]
June 7, 2011
Scientists have long puzzled over why Mars is only about half the size and one-tenth the mass of Earth. As next-door neighbors in the solar system formed about the same time, they might be expected to be more similar – by rights, Mars should be as big as Earth and Venus But a paper published… [Read more…]
June 5, 2011
After 40 years of missions to Mars, its secrets could finally be within our reach Forty years ago, space engineers launched a probe that would play a pivotal role in changing our understanding of our place in the cosmos. On 30 May 1971, Mariner 9 was dispatched to Mars on an Atlas Centaur rocket and… [Read more…]
June 1, 2011
Two digital color cameras on the mast of NASA’s next Mars rover will complement each other in showing the surface of Mars in exquisite detail. They are the left and right eyes of the Mast Camera, or Mastcam, instrument on the Curiosity rover of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, launching in late 2011….. Read more: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1UPZyV/www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/06/next-mars-rover-will-see-in-3-d-color.html
May 30, 2011
Mars developed in as little as two to four million years after the birth of the solar system, far more quickly than Earth, according to a new study published in the May 26 issue of the journal Nature. The red planet’s rapid formation helps explain why it is so small, say the study’s co-authors, Nicolas… [Read more…]
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May 9, 2012
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