Edwards AFB - Jan 21, 2004 - Before NASA's first successful Mars Exploration Rover landed on the planet Mars January 3, 2004, a rover prototype helped refine navigational software at a unique site on Earth that replicates Martian terrain.
Pasadena - Jan 20, 2004 - NASA's Spirit rover has successfully driven to its first target on Mars, a football-sized rock that scientists have dubbed Adirondack. The Mars Exploration Rover flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., plans to send commands to Spirit early Tuesday to examine Adirondack with a microscope and two instruments that reveal the composition of rocks, said JPL's Dr. Mark Adler, Spirit mission manager. The instruments are the M¿ssbauer spectrometer and the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer.
Pasadena - Jan 19, 2004 - With the deployment of the Spirit Rover, a robotic arm built by Alliance Spacesystems is now in action. The robotic arm (formally known as the Instrument Deployment Device, or IDD) has five rotating joints and an extended length of more than one meter. The arm is mounted to the forward structure of the Spirit rover and was secured during launch, landing, and rover positioning by ASI-designed restraint mechanisms at the arm elbow and the instrument turret at its outboard end.
Pasadena - Jan 19, 2004 - With barely a week before reaching Mars, NASA's Opportunity spacecraft adjusted its trajectory, or flight path, today for the first time in four months.
Paris - Jan 19, 2004 - Every day, people around the world tune in weather forecasts to plan their days ahead. Soon ESA will be delivering the same service for Mars, thanks to an ingenious experiment on board Mars Express.
Paris - Jan 19, 2004 - ESA's Mars Express orbiter flew almost directly over NASA's Spirit rover on at Gusev Crater on January 16 at an altitude of about 300 kilometres. Mars Express uses four instruments to look down, while Spirit looks up.
Bozeman - Jan 19, 2004 - If you think the Mars rovers are interesting, wait until you see a mini-van clambering over the planet's red rocks and dusty lake beds. The two golf-cart size rovers that are mesmerizing the country now are preparing the way for a 2009 mission to Mars called the Mars Scientific Laboratory, says William Hiscock, head of the physics department and director of the Montana Space Grant Consortium based at Montana State University-Bozeman. The 2009 mission will involve a rover, too, but that vehicle will be the size of a mini-van.
Pasadena - Jan 19, 2004 - Last week as NASA was only just beginning to pivot Spirit around for egress the science exploration and mapping teams were deciding their travel plans beyond the landing zone.
Ithaca - Jan 19, 2004 - During the most recent early afternoon on Mars, the temperature at the rover Spirit landing site in Gusev crater was an admittedly chilly minus 11 degrees Celsius (12 degrees Fahrenheit). But it was still warmer than most cities in the upper Northeast, gripped in a frigid winter chill.
Buffalo - Jan 19, 2004 - The anticipated Mars landing on Jan. 24 of the Opportunity rover will be a bit more challenging than the Spirit's bounce onto the red planet earlier this month, according to a University at Buffalo geologist, but if it's successful, then scientists will be able to be much bolder about selecting future Mars landing sites.
Boston - Jan 19, 2004 - Students and researchers at MIT are designing a space mission to learn about the effects of Mars-level gravity using pint-sized astronauts. The 15 mouse-trounauts will orbit Earth for five weeks to help researchers learn how Martian gravity -- about one-third that of Earth -- will affect the mammalian body.
Pasadena (JPL) Jan 19, 2004 - NASA's Spirit rover reached out with its versatile robotic arm early Friday and examined a patch of fine-grained martian soil with a microscope at the end of the arm. We made our first use of the arm and took the first microscopic image of the surface of another planet, said Dr. Mark Adler, Spirit mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Beijing - Jan 15, 2004 - US Mars rover Spirit landed successfully on the Mars on Jan. 4. It is learned that there are over 300 Chinese scientists in US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). They are getting along well with scientists from various countries and have made great achievements.
Waterloo - Jan 15, 2004 - Three days after successfully landing on Mars, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has successfully begun transmitting high resolution colour images of the red planet. The CCD image sensor chips, designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, were manufactured at DALSA's semiconductor wafer production facility in Bromont, Quebec.
Pasadena - Jan 15, 2004 - We asked the rover engineers to fit a square peg in a round hole, said the Spirit rover mission manager, Jennifer Trosper of NASA JPL. On a very big day today, the engineering team unfolded that square rover from its triangular landing petal.
Pasadena - Jan 15, 2004 - Scientists have a crush on Mars, and it's hard not to look only for things we want to see, says Mars Exploration Rover scientist, John Grant, from Washington D.C.'s National Air and Space Museum.
