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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pasadena (JPL) Feb 11, 2004 - NASA's Spirit rover has begun making some of its own driving decisions while its twin, Opportunity, is presenting scientists with decisions to make about studying small spheres embedded in bedrock, like berries in a muffin.
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.
Pasadena - Feb 11, 2004 - Scientists responsible for Opportunity's Mini-TES (miniature thermal emission spectrometer) have produced the first mineral map ever made from the surface of another planet. It depicts the concentration of hematite present in a small region of the floor of the crater that surrounds the rover.
Pasadena - Feb 11, 2004 - This generation of Mars rovers have begun testing and using the first constellation of satellites that can act as complex communication relays. Numbering three in total the orbiters include the Mars Odyssey, Global Surveyor and Express.
Friedrichshafen - Feb 09, 2004 - EADS Space has been awarded a EUR900k study by ESA to carry out the first definition of a Rover to explore the Martian surface and search for life.
Friedrichshafen - Feb 09, 2004 - EADS Space has been awarded a EUR600k Study by ESA to carry out the first definition of a European Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. The study will benefit from the combined resources of EADS Astrium and EADS Space Transportation.
Pasadena (JPL) Feb 09, 2004 - NASA's Opportunity has examined its first patch of soil in the small crater where the rover landed on Mars and found strikingly spherical pebbles among the mix of particles there. There are features in this soil unlike anything ever seen on Mars before, said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science instruments on the two Mars Exploration Rovers.
