The new frontier of exploration.
Mars Daily Editorial Team
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.

Legacy Reports

Earth, Wind and Fire: What’s Missing?

Moffett Field - Jan 09, 2004 - There is one question that the Spirit rover's mission will try to answer. Which primordial elements dominated the crater formation at Gusev? Among the choices are fire (volcanism), water (ponding or glacial), impacts (dust) or wind? Mars seems to offer three elements in abundance: earth, wind and at least ancient fire. [Mars is home to the largest volcano in the solar system, appropriately named Mount Olympus].

Jan 9, 2004
Legacy Reports

ILC Dover Airbags Cushion MER Spirit Landing on Mars

Frederica - Jan 07, 2004 - On January 4, 2004, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) named Spirit, ended its 300-million-mile journey from Earth with a successful landing on the surface of Mars. ILC Dover, Inc. of Frederica, Delaware was NASA's prime contractor for the airbag subsystem that helped make the landing a success. The concept of a cushioned landing on Mars using ILC airbags was first successfully demonstrated on the NASA Pathfinder mission in 1997.

Jan 7, 2004
Legacy Reports

Endurance Of Plants Under Quartz Rocks Possible Model For Life On Early Earth

Durham - Jan 06, 2004 - Microscopic Mojave Desert plants growing on the underside of translucent quartz pebbles can endure both chilly and near-boiling temperatures, scavenge nitrogen from the air, and utilize the equivalent of nighttime moonlight levels for photosynthesis, a new study reports. The plants, which receive enough light through the pebbles to support photosynthesis, could offer a model for how plants first colonized land, as well as how they might have evolved on Mars, said the scientists who performed the study.

Jan 6, 2004
Legacy Reports

Healthy Rover Shows Its New Neighborhood On Mars

Pasadena (JPL) Jan 04, 2004 - NASA's Spirit Rover is starting to examine its new surroundings, revealing a vast flatland well suited to the robot's unprecedented mobility and scientific toolkit. Spirit has told us that it is healthy, Jennifer Trosper of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said today. Trosper is Spirit mission manager for operations on Mars' surface. The rover remains perched on its lander platform, and the next nine days or more will be spent preparing for egress, or rolling off, onto the martian surface.

Jan 4, 2004
Legacy Reports

Navigators Score Precise Mars Landing Result

Pasadena (JPL) Jan 04, 2004 - Anyone who's been blindfolded and spun around knows how hard it is to pin the tail on the donkey, even though players are pointed in the right direction when they last look at their target. To land in a precise location on Mars after traveling over 300 million miles, navigators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had to overcome the head-spinning challenges of calculating the exact speeds of a rotating Earth, a rotating Mars, and a rotating spacecraft, while they all simultaneously are spinning in their own radical orbits around the Sun.

Jan 4, 2004