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.

The Big Dig Begins On Planet Mars

Moffett Field - Feb 25, 2004 - We dug a nice big hole on Mars, said Jeffrey Biesiadecki, a rover planner at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The rover alternately pushed soil forward and backward out of the trench with its right front wheel while other wheels held the rover in place. The rover turned slightly between bouts of digging to widen the hole. We took a patient, gentle approach to digging, Biesiadecki said. The process lasted 22 minutes.

Feb 25, 2004

ESA Prepares Mission To Search For Life On Mars

Paris - Feb 24, 2004 - Before humans can leave their boot prints on the dusty surface of Mars, many questions have to be answered and many problems solved. One of the most fundamental questions - one that has intrigued humankind for centuries - is whether life has ever existed on Mars, the most Earthlike of all the planets.

Feb 24, 2004

Opportunity Examines Trench As Spirit Prepares To Dig One

Pasadena - Feb 20, 2004 - By inspecting the sides and floor of a hole it dug on Mars, NASA's Opportunity rover is finding some things it did not see beforehand, including round pebbles that are shiny and soil so fine-grained that the rover's microscope can't make out individual particles.

Feb 20, 2004

Can People Go To Mars

Huntsville - Feb 19, 2004 - It's a question of radiation, says Frank Cucinotta of NASA's Space Radiation Health Project at the Johnson Space Center. We know how much radiation is out there, waiting for us between Earth and Mars, but we're not sure how the human body is going to react to it.

Feb 19, 2004

Was Mars Born Bone Dry

Moffett Field - Feb 18, 2004 - The MER rovers Spirit and Opportunity, now traveling on the surface of Mars, are exploring a geography drier than the driest desert on Earth. Despite the polar ice caps and suspected pockets of liquid water beneath the martian surface, the amount of water on Mars is but a teaspoon compared to the vast watery reserves of Earth. Why is Mars so dry?

Feb 18, 2004

Evocative Debris, Orbital Opportunity

Moffett Field - Feb 16, 2004 - As you saw with Spirit, said Tim McElrath of the Opportunity's navigation team, we have a number ways to locate a rover. The 44 by 5 miles across, that error ellipse was what we worked for six months to define before landing. We were fortunate to have two Deep Space Network tracking stations, so we could see two-way Doppler data all the way down during descent until the parachute opened.

Feb 16, 2004

Aloha Mars – The Advanced Course

Honolulu - Feb 13, 2004 - My friend Dr. X is really getting interested in Mars. Yesterday he challenged me about those mysterious spherical beads at the Opportunity landing site. The MER guys are struggling to choose between a bunch of wildly different explanations. I suppose you have an instant snap analysis of them based on your crazy Aloha Mars model that relates everything on Mars to something in Hawaii.

Feb 13, 2004

International Interplanetary Networking Succeeds With Mars Earth Link Up

Pasadena - Feb 13, 2004 - A pioneering demonstration of communications between NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and the European Space Agency (ESA) Mars Express orbiter succeeded. On February 6, while Mars Express was flying over the area Spirit was examining, the orbiter transferred commands from Earth to the rover and relayed data from the robotic explorer back to Earth.

Feb 13, 2004

UK and ESA Announce Beagle 2 Inquiry

London - Feb 13, 2004 - Beagle 2, the British-built element of ESA's Mars Express mission, has failed to communicate since its first radio contact was missed shortly after it was due to land on Mars on Christmas Day. The Beagle 2 Management Board met in London on Friday 6 February and, following an assessment of the situation, declared Beagle 2 lost.

Feb 13, 2004

Olympus Mons: The Caldera In Close-Up

Paris (ESA) Feb 13, 2004 - View from overhead of the complex caldera (summit crater) at the summit of Olympus Mons on Mars, the highest volcano in our Solar System. Olympus Mons has an average elevation of 22 km and the caldera has a depth of about 3 km. This is the first high-resolution colour image of the complete caldera of Olympus Mons.

Feb 13, 2004

An Odyssey of Mars Science: Part 3

Sacramento - Feb 12, 2004 - Odyssey's GRS also mapped iron -- and confirmed the data from all other analytical instruments to examine Mars so far, to the effect that Mars' fine soil is richer in iron than either its Type 1 or 2 rocks.

Feb 12, 2004

Aloha, Mars

Honolulu - Feb 11, 2004 - Right after the Spirit rover landed on Mars, I made a flippant remark to my friend Dr. X to the effect that Gusev Crater is one big basalt flow, not a lakebed like they think. All the rocks in the rover pictures look just like the ones in my neighbor's garden wall.

Feb 11, 2004

Digitally Directed, The Mars Missions

Moffett Field - Feb 11, 2004 - In the first of a two-part series, the film-maker for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) video, Daniel Maas, talks to Astrobilology Magazine about how the stunningly realistic mission simulation came to life. In this part, he describes the inner workings of how such realism is obtained.

Feb 11, 2004

Exploring Mars With Balloons

Altadena - Feb 11, 2004 - Balloons outfitted with innovative steering devices and robot probes may be the best way to perform detailed surveys of Mars in preparation for human exploration. Dr. Alexey Pankine, a project scientist at the Global Aerospace Corporation, presented an analysis of balloon applications for Mars exploration at the Space Technology and Applications International Forum in Albuquerque, NM on February 10, 2004.

Feb 11, 2004

How To Wind A Martian Watch

Moffett Field - Feb 11, 2004 - Keeping time on Mars might seem easy. Like adding leap-years, some standard time offset might be imagined to take care of the longer martian day. Naively put, how to keep track of martian time might seem only to require adding a daily drift. Each day on Mars needs a good Earth watch that can tick 2375.244 seconds longer.

Feb 11, 2004

Mars, The ‘Little Round Guys’

Pasadena - Feb 11, 2004 - Cornell principal investigator for the Mars rovers, Steve Squyres, compared their immediate science challenge to the Indian proverb about reconstructing an elephant by touching only a part: 'the leg makes it a tree trunk, the tail makes it a snake, etc.' The outcrop is that elephant. We have tiny pieces of clues.

Feb 11, 2004