The new frontier of exploration.

Editorial Team

Mars Daily Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Mars Daily Editorial Team produces Mars Daily's coverage of Mars exploration and science. We report on rovers and orbiters, sample-return and human-Mars planning, and the geology, atmosphere and astrobiology of the Red Planet. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Mars Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Opportunity Making Its Way To Final Position On Cape Desire

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 05, 2007 - Opportunity spent the last week moving around the end of Cape Desire to three different imaging locations, each about 2 to 3 meters (6.6 to 9.8 feet) apart. Right now, Opportunity is driving about 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) to the final position to finish collecting long-baseline stereo images in the direction of Cabo Corrientes (to the east) and Cabo Anonimo (to the west).

Feb 5, 2007

Spirit Studies Layered Rocks And Wind-Blown Drifts

Pasadena CA (SPX) Feb 02, 2007 - With the rover's third Martian spring just around the corner, Spirit is healthy and has started acquiring movies with the navigation camera in search of dust devils wheeling across the terrain. Spring officially begins on Martian day, or sol 1103 (Feb. 8, 2007). During the past week, Spirit acquired microscopic images of a soil target called Londonderry, which is an active wind drift shaped by the motion of bouncing sand grains.

Feb 2, 2007

Dig Deeply To Seek Life On Mars

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 31, 2007 - Probes seeking life on Mars must dig deeply into young craters, gullies, or recently exposed ice to have a chance of finding any living cells that were not annihilated by radiation, researchers report in a new study. One promising place to look for them is within the ice at Elysium, site of a recently discovered frozen sea, they say. Current probes designed to find life on Mars cannot drill deeply enough to find living cells that may exist well below the surface, according to the study.

Jan 31, 2007

Martian Clouds Pass By On A Winter Afternoon

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 31, 2007 - NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured a view of wispy afternoon clouds, not unlike fair weather clouds on Earth, passing overhead on the rover's 956th sol, or Martian day (Oct. 2, 2006). With Opportunity facing northeast, the clouds appear to drift gently toward the west in this movie taken with the rover's navigation camera. The 10 frames, taken 32 seconds apart, show the formation and evolution of what are likely mid-level, convective water clouds.

Jan 31, 2007

Ongoing Preparations for Mars Swing-by

Paris, France (ESA) Jan 30, 2007 - This view of Mars (visible towards the top of the image) and of the Milky Way was taken by the OSRIS camera on board the Rosetta orbiter on 3 December 2006, during the last series of instrument check-outs. In this image Mars is heavily overexposed and therefore surrounded by a halo of scattered light. OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) will continue to image Mars during the next major mission phase: the swing-by of planet Mars at the end of February 2007.

Jan 30, 2007

Opportunity Hones Reckoning Skills And Tests Computer Smarts

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 30, 2007 - After driving around the Bay of Toil onto Cape Desire, a promontory overlooking Victoria Crater, Opportunity began testing various techniques for visually determining the rover's precise location after moving across sandy, somewhat slippery terrain. Because the sandy surface is largely flat and featureless (except for the dropoff into Victoria Crater), the rover's primary reference points are the long rows of repeating ridges and holes in its own tracks.

Jan 30, 2007

Satellite View of MER-B Journey Around Victoria Crater

Tucson AZ (SPX) Jan 29, 2007 - Three years after embarking on a historic exploration of the red planet and six miles away from its landing site, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is traversing Victoria Crater ridge by ridge, peering at layered cliffs in the interior. To identify various alcoves and cliffs along the way, science team members are using names of places visited by the 16th-century Earth explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew aboard the ship Victoria, who proved the Earth is round. (All names are unofficial unless approved by the International Astronomical Union.)

Jan 29, 2007

HiRise Camera Shows Mojave Crater Peak Is High And Dry

Tuscon AZ (SPX) Jan 25, 2007 - The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a huge, detailed image of Mars' Mojave crater on Jan. 7, 2007. Part of that photograph shows the central uplift structure in the crater. Rocks that form this peak were several kilometers beneath the surface until an impact formed the 37 mile-diameter (60 kilometer) crater just north of Mars' equator. The HiRISE image shows that boulders as large as 50 feet across (15 meters) have eroded from the massive uplifted rock and rolled downslope.

Jan 25, 2007

A Stellar Moment Frozen In Martian Time

Pasadena (SPX) Jan 24, 2007 - An image of sunset on Mars, taken by Spirit, won in a public poll. This contest, and other new multimedia pieces, help mark the twin rovers' third anniversary on the red planet. On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th martian day, or sol.

Jan 24, 2007

Spirit Studies Distinctive Rock Layers With Granules And Platy Beds

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 23, 2007 - Spirit is healthy and continues to make progress on scientific studies of a rock exposure known as Montalva, which is one of the lower layers of an outcrop known as Troll. Compositional data that Spirit collected using the alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer suggest the rock has high potassium content. To confirm this, scientists selected an adjacent exposure for further scrutiny.

Jan 23, 2007

German HRSC Onboard Mars Express Now In Its Third Year

Paris, France (SPX) Jan 22, 2007 - Exactly three years ago today, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard the Mars Express probe captured its first image data of our neighbouring planet. After more than 3800 orbits of Mars, the camera has imaged an area larger than North and South America with a resolution of between ten and twenty metres per pixel, in colour and in 3D.

Jan 22, 2007

Opportunity Studies Cobbles And Rock Exposures Around ‘Victoria Crater’

Pasadena CA (SPX) Jan 22, 2007 - Opportunity continues to make progress in acquiring long-baseline stereo images of Victoria Crater. To do this, the rover moves laterally from one point to another between taking images with the left and right eyes of the panoramic camera. The path separating the images is known as a baseline and increases the apparent visual depth of features in the terrain.

Jan 22, 2007

Europe Faces Crunch Decision Over Mars Rover Mission

Paris (AFP) Jan 17, 2007 - Members of the European Space Agency face a looming tough decision over whether to cut back a planned unmanned mission to Mars or stump up extra cash, ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain warned on Wednesday. The ExoMars mission entails sending a 200-kilo (440-pound) wheeled rover, which will carry a drill enabling it delve up to two metres (seven feet) below the surface to see if the Red Planet has microbial life, or the potential for it.

Jan 17, 2007

Spirit Continues To Test New Computer Smarts

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 15, 2007 - On the rover's 1,068th sol, or Martian day of exploration on Mars (Jan. 4, 2007), Spirit used its new computer smarts to autonomously acquire images of the terrain using the hazard avoidance camera, construct a three-dimensional model of the terrain, identify rock or soil exposures of interest, and generate plans for placing the Moessbauer spectrometer and microscopic imager on 10 of those targets.

Jan 15, 2007

MRO Conducts Details Survery Of Mars Pathfinder Landing Site And Surroundings

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 11, 2007 - The high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged the 1997 landing site of NASA's Mars Pathfinder, revealing new details of hardware on the surface and the geology of the region. Pathfinder landed on July 4, 1997, and transmitted data for 12 weeks. Unlike the two larger rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, currently active on Mars, Sojourner could communicate only with the lander, not directly with Earth.

Jan 11, 2007

NASA Funds Scripps Instrument For Probing For Life On Mars

San Diego CA (SPX) Jan 11, 2007 - On Monday, NASA announced $750,000 in funding for development of an instrument to detect signs of life on Mars proposed by a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. The instrument is designed to provide the most rigorous analysis possible for the past and present existence of biological compounds on Mars' surface, according to Jeffrey Bada, a professor at Scripps and lead investigator on the project team.

Jan 11, 2007