Moffett Field CA - Mar 24, 2004 - The story of water on ancient Mars just got more interesting. Scientists working on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission announced last week that the small spherules of rock, referred to as blueberries, embedded in the bedrock outcrop near the Opportunity landing site contain the iron oxide hematite.
Huntsville AL - Mar 24, 2004 - Sludge. That's what most people think of when they envision the gray, powdery soil ¿ called regolith ¿ covering the airless surface of the Moon. Not Dr. Mike Duke. He sees gold.
Pasadena - Mar 23, 2004 - NASA today released details on news findings on Mars that point to the first strong evidence that a sea once covered part of Mars in the Meridiani Planum area where Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is currrently exploring.
Moffett Field - Mar 22, 2004 - Astronomers have known for years that Mars possessed polar ice caps, but early attempts at chemical analysis suggested only that the northern cap could be composed of water ice, and the southern cap was thought to be carbon dioxide ice.
Pasadena - Mar 22, 2004 - After a slightly slippery start yestersol, Opportunity made it out of Eagle Crater on sol 57, which ends at 8:45 p.m. PST on March 22. The drive along the crater's inner slope that was initiated on the last sol continued this sol until Opportunity exited its landing-site crater.
Pasadena - Mar 22, 2004 - NASA's Opportunity tried driving uphill out of its landing-site crater during its 56th sol, ending at 10:05 p.m. March 21, PST, but slippage prevented success.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this pair of microscopic imager pictures of the drift dubbed "Serpent" on Spirit's 73rd martian day on Mars after successfully digging into the side of the drift.
Pasadena (JPL) Mar 18, 2004 - A major ingredient in small mineral spheres analyzed by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity furthers understanding of past water at Opportunity's landing site and points to a way of determining whether the vast plains surrounding the site also have a wet history.
Pasadena - Mar 17, 2004 - This image shows the transit of Mars' moon Phobos across the Sun. The images were taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on the morning of the 45th martian day, or sol, of its mission. This observation will help refine our knowledge of the orbit and position of Phobos.
Pasadena - Mar 16, 2004 - Here I was: 26 years old, I had never worked on a flight project before, and all eyes were on me. Every time I walked by the Pathfinder project office, Tony Spear, the project manager, would throw his arm around me and announce, Hey everybody, the whole mission is riding on this guy right here.
Moffett Field - Mar 12, 2004 - Locally, Earth has its habitable extremes: Antarctica, the Sahara desert, the Dead Sea, Mount Etna. Globally, our blue planet is positioned in the solar system's habitable zone, or 'Goldilocks' region where the temperature and pressure are just right to support liquid water and life. Across the borders from this goldilocks zone orbit our two neighbors: the runaway greenhouse planet, Venus--which in goldilocks' terms is 'too hot'--and the frigid red planet, Mars, which is 'too cold'.
Moffett Field - Mar 12, 2004 - Since their arrivals on Mars, our two robotic wanderers have sent us incredible images and data from one of our nearest neighbors in the Solar System. The primary science objective of the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) is to determine to what degree the past action of liquid water on Mars has influenced the Red Planet's environment over time.
Pasadena (JPL) Mar 11, 2004 - NASA's Spirit has begun looking down into a crater it has been approaching for several weeks, providing a view of what's below the surrounding surface.
Palo Alto - Mar 10, 2004 - Agilent Technologies Inc. today announced that General Dynamics C4 Systems selected its system-development software to test communication equipment used in the Mars Exploration Rovers.
Moffett Field - Mar 10, 2004 - One milestone that humans are not liable to achieve in the near future is to smell another planet. It is a basic human curiousity to imagine what another world might smell like. Some senses are noticeably absent for today's space travelers, since harsh environments are unlikely to reveal themselves in sensaround. A spacesuit is a bubble with its own isolated sense experiences, much akin to a sensory isolation tank.
Pasadena (JPL) Mar 10, 2004 - On February 9, the wake up song for Opportunity was 'Slip Sliding Away' by Simon and Garfunkel in honor of the experience the prior day when Opportunity first tried to scoot up the crater slope at Meridiani Planum. The ambitious rover aimed for its target and willingly went forth up the slope; nevertheless, Opportunity slipped and slid in the sand, making it only half way to its target.
