St Louis MO (SPX) Apr 20, 2007 - Earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are paving the way for a smooth landing on Mars for the Phoenix Mission scheduled to launch in August this year by making sure the set-down literally is not a rocky one. Phoenix is the first mission in NASA's Scout Program and will study the planet's ice cap.
Burbank, CA (SPX) Apr 17, 2007 - 37 Martian rocks that somehow reached our planet over the eons may be key to telling us how Mars was formed, and may also tell us the best place to land when we visit the Red Planet.
Pasadena CA (SPX) Apr 17, 2007 - Opportunity is healthy and spent the last week investigating the dark material trailing north from Victoria Crater. The plan this week included two brief robotic arm campaigns at different areas roughly 33 meters (108 feet) apart. Opportunity will collect a series of microscopic images and alpha particle X-ray spectrometer integrations on the soil along with other remote science observations.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 16, 2007 - On sol 1120 (February 26, 2007), the navigation camera aboard NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured one of the best dust devils it's seen in its three-plus year mission. The series of navigation camera images were put together to make a dust devil movie.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 16, 2007 - Fourteen thousand feet above the vast fetch of the Pacific Ocean, Diana Blaney announces, Guide Dog is ready. Big Dog is ready. Roger, says telescope operator Paul Sears. Guide Dog is on. Big Dog is on.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 16, 2007 - After studying Mars four times as long as originally planned, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter appears to have succumbed to battery failure caused by a complex sequence of events involving the onboard computer memory and ground commands.
University Park, PA (SPX) Apr 13, 2007 - Monitoring radiation from solar flares to ensuring that fellow crew members on the surface receive ample warning is only one of the tasks for Irene Schneider Puente, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State, as a member of the Crew 61, a two-week simulation of Martian exploration.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 11, 2007 - Spirit is healthy and has finished her science campaign at Mitcheltree Ridge. The rover is now heading south along the outside edge of Home Plate toward an outcrop named Madeline English. After the investigation of Madeline English the rover will head back north to one of several possible on-ramps for making its way onto Home Plate. In the early morning of sol 1151 Spirit will perform its first overnight communications relay with Mars Odyssey since before winter (sol 846)!
Opportunity is healthy and is attempting to characterize the dark wind streak material which emanates from Victoria Crater as seen from orbital images. On Sol 1132 the team planned a four-hour alpha particle X-ray spectrometer integration to measure atmospheric Argon. The purpose of this measurement is to determine the atmospheric mixing processes and track their changes with time. - Sol 1137 included a test of a fix for a steering bias bug in the mobility flight software. This is the fix for the problem the team saw on sol 1114, when the software selected an arc that was 13 degrees off course from the goal.
State College (UPI) Pa., April 10, 2007 - An international team will live in a small shelter in the Utah desert for two weeks this month in a NASA simulation of Martian exploration. The experiment, called Crew 61, is sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Spaceward Bound program and the Mars Society.
Pasadena CA (SPX) Apr 10, 2007 - Opportunity is healthy and working on obtaining a long baseline stereo image of the bay Valley without Peril. On Sol 1128 a test of a work around for the failed RAT (rock abrasion tool) grind encoder was successful. A temporary software addition allows the rover to bypass a check that was causing it to fail.
Paris (AFP) Apr 06, 2007 - Global warming could be heating Mars four times faster than Earth due to a mutually reinforcing interplay of wind-swept dust and changes in reflected heat from the Sun, according a study released Wednesday.
Paris, France (SPX) Apr 05, 2007 - By studying the South Polar region of Mars, the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding) radar of the Mars Express space probe has enabled the structure of the layered deposits of this region to be elucidated. For the first time in the history of planetary exploration, topographic maps of the Martian sub-soil have been produced, revealing considerable volumes of ice.
Paris, France (ESA) Apr 03, 2007 - Starting in spring next year, a crew of six will be sent on a 500 day simulated mission to Mars. In reality the crew will remain in a special isolation facility in Russia. To investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration mission, such as to Mars, ESA is looking for experiment proposals for research to be carried out during their stay.
Pasadena CA (SPX) Apr 02, 2007 - Spirit remains healthy and spent much of the week studying a new rock target on Mitcheltree Ridge called Torquas. Scientists are trying to understand what relationship Mitcheltree Ridge has to Home Plate -- for example, whether it is an extension of Home Plate or an entirely different rock layer, and whether it has similar composition or morphology.
Flagstaff AZ (SPX) Apr 02, 2007 - Applying techniques used to scope out caves on Earth to probe the possibility of caves on Mars is paying off. NAU researchers Glen Cushing and J. Judson Wynne, working at the U.S. Geological Survey, propose that photos from the Mars Odyssey mission reveal football-field size holes that could be entrances to caves.
