Swindon UK (SPX) Feb 27, 2007 - NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft has used its onboard High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) to take a colour image of a region of Mars in the vicinity of the intended landing site of Beagle 2.
Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Feb 27, 2007 - Autonomous navigation software developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) drove the NASA Mars Rover Opportunity last week in the software's first live test on the Red Planet.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 27, 2007 - NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life's molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 26, 2007 - Spirit is healthy and making progress on the return trek to Home Plate. Rover handlers have put use of the robotic arm on hold in order to run diagnostic tests of apparent positioning errors in the placement of instruments on the arm. Meanwhile, Spirit continues driving, searching for dust devils and clouds using WATCH computer commands, and acquiring other remote sensing data.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 23, 2007 - Opportunity is healthy and is currently driving on the promontory Cabo Corrientes where its cameras imaged the north face of Bahia Blanca cliff walls. The rover is currently driving to another spot in order to image Cape Desire. February 9th, 2007, was the first day of spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars.
Laurel MD (SPX) Feb 21, 2007 - Reaching its first 100 days of operations, the powerful mineral-detector aboard the newest satellite to circle Mars is changing the way scientists view the history of water on the red planet. The Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., has teamed with the five other cameras and sensors aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to provide new clues about where water could have existed on or near the Martian surface.
Paris (AFP) Feb 21, 2007 - What's the biggest hurdle to setting up a colony on the Moon or getting mankind to Mars and beyond? Aliens? Asteroids? Money? Try: humans themselves. Experts poring over plans to return to the Moon by 2018 and later stride to Mars believe the greatest-ever gamble in the history of space may ultimately depend on keeping the mind and body sound.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 20, 2007 - Rover drivers have now refined their techniques for maneuvering on only five wheels. All of Spirit's drives during the past week ended within centimeters (inches) of the targeted endpoint. Spirit is healthy and has arrived at the rock outcrop known as Bellingshausen on the way back to Home Plate.
San Francisco CA (SPX) Feb 20, 2007 - Hunting for traces of life on Mars calls for two radically different strategies, says Arizona State University professor Jack Farmer. Of the two, he says, with today's exploration technology we can most easily look for evidence for past life, preserved as fossil biosignatures in old rocks. Farmer is a professor of geological sciences in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, where he heads the astrobiology program.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 16, 2007 - A spacecraft recently arrived at Mars has provided new evidence that fluids, likely including water, once flowed widely through underlying bedrock in a canyon that is part of the great Martian rift valley. The new color images from the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show an equatorial landscape of hills composed of dozens of alternating layers of dark- and light-toned rocks, and crossed by dark sand dunes.
San Francisco (AFP) Feb 15, 2007 - Growing evidence of water on Mars adds weight to the theory that life once existed and could still exist beneath its surface, said a group of scientists meeting in San Francisco. We have abundant evidence that early Mars was water rich, Houston, Texas, Lunar and Planetary Institute astronomer Stephen Clifford told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 13, 2007 - Until recently, NASA's two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, could figure only one or two steps ahead in planning a path and driving on their own. New software uploaded to the rovers onboard computers now enables them to look ahead and plan a path to a spot 50 meters (164 feet) away, evading obstacles along the way.
Paris, France (SPX) Feb 13, 2007 - Thales's space laser programme has achieved a new milestone with the successful completion of shock-resistance tests at over 2,000 g in all three axes. Designed to operate for two years on Mars after a 10-month voyage through space, the Thales laser has already demonstrated impressive performance, including energy delivery of 30 mJ per pulse across a temperature range of -30 to +30oC and the ability to withstand extremely hostile radiation and dust environments.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 13, 2007 - Opportunity has completed a remote sensing campaign at Cape Desire and is on the move to the next promontory, called Cabo Corrientes. Opportunity's odometer rolled past 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) during the 50.51-meter (166 feet) drive on sol 1080. By contrast, the NASA Level 1 requirements for the mission called for achieving at least 600 meters (1,969 feet) with one rover, and the mission design requirement was for 1,000 meters (3,281 feet).
Paris, France (ESA) Feb 13, 2007 - Scientists using data from the HRSC experiment onboard ESA's Mars Express spacecraft have produced the first 'hiker's maps' of Mars. Giving detailed height contours and names of geological features in the Iani Chaos region, the maps could become a standard reference for future Martian research. The maps are known as topographic maps because they use contour lines to show the heights of the landscape.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 12, 2007 - Spring is in the thin, Martian atmosphere once again as NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit scans the local terrain for dust devils expected this time of year. The rover remains healthy and has completed remote sensing studies of a soil target known as Tyrone, conducted from a distance of about 10 meters (33 feet) away. Tyrone has bright soil upturned in wheel tracks.
