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.

Mars Express Cruising Along – 69 Days From MOI

Paris - Oct 17, 2003 - The Mars Express spacecraft is in good health and is operating normally. Some payload activities were executed on 30 September 2003, involving the SPICAM and OMEGA spectrometers. SPICAM and OMEGA were turned on in order to check the mechanisms of these instruments. The PFS and HRSC Interplanetary Cruise checkouts were conducted successfully on 6 October 2003. The remaining orbiter instruments checkouts to be done during the Interplanetary Cruise phase will be completed by the end of October.

Oct 17, 2003

Martian History: Written in Stone

On Mars, three instruments will work together to perform remote analysis of the rock and soil that the Mars rovers encounter.

Oct 17, 2003

MSSS Adds Another 10,000 Surveyor Images To Database

San Diego - Oct 01, 2003 - Thousands of newly released portraits of martian landscapes from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft testify to the diversity of ways geological processes have sculpted the surface of our neighboring planet.

Oct 1, 2003

What Iron Can Tell Us about Mars

Moffett Field - Sep 29, 2003 - If Mars ever harbored living things, it must have had liquid water. Searching for liquid water on a mostly dry planet would be hard enough, but how do you search for evidence of water that evaporated long ago?

Sep 29, 2003

Webcasts Feature Scientists On A Mars Mission

Moffett Field - Sep 25, 2003 - NASA and Spanish scientists, who are developing ways to drill into Mars in search of underground life, will take part in eight worldwide, educational webcasts from their project site near Spain's Rio Tinto River from Sept. 29 to Oct. 15.

Sep 25, 2003

Early Mars Was Frozen – But Habitable: Part II

Moffett Field - Sep 24, 2003 - Early Mars was cold - very cold, says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center. But that doesn't mean it was incapable of supporting life. McKay has extensively studied life in some of the harshest environments in the world: the Antarctic dry valleys, the Arctic, and the Atacama desert.

Sep 24, 2003

Scientists Practice Mars Drilling Near Acidic Spanish River

Nerva - Sep 23, 2003 - To develop techniques to drill into the surface of Mars to look for signs of life, NASA and Spanish scientists recently began drilling 150 meters (495 feet) into the ground near the source of the waters of the Rio Tinto, a river in southwestern Spain, part of a three-year effort that will include the search for underground life forms.

Sep 23, 2003

Chomping Away On Martian Nano-Nuggets

Moffett Field - Sep 18, 2003 - Nanobacteria are not alive, but instead are the result of enzymes that break down organic material, according to a new study published in the journal Geology.

Sep 18, 2003

Early Mars Was Frozen: But Habitable

Moffett Field - Sep 18, 2003 - Early Mars was cold - very cold, says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center. But that doesn't mean it was incapable of supporting life. McKay has extensively studied life in some of the harshest environments in the world: the Antarctic dry valleys, the Arctic, and the Atacama desert.

Sep 18, 2003

Surveying The Scene – Martian Style

Moffett Field - Sep 09, 2003 - Like all good exploration vessels, each of the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, includes a mast. Instead of a crow's nest and a lookout, however, the rover mast-a little more than a meter tall-is topped by a pair of cameras-collectively called the Pancam (panoramic camera)-that can image the scene around the rover as sharply as a person with 20-20 vision.

Sep 9, 2003

The Planet that Won’t Go Away

Huntsville - Sep 09, 2003 - Mars' closest approach to Earth was on August 27th--but the red planet is even easier to see now. Tony, it's still there. I can't believe how bright it is! That's what my mother said to me on the phone last night. She had just stepped outside for some fresh air and was startled by an orange star hanging over her house: Mars--so intense it was worth a phone call.

Sep 9, 2003

Drip Drip Drip Under A Feeble Sun

Fayetteville - Sep 04, 2003 - A team of researchers from the University of Arkansas has measured water evaporation rates under Mars-like conditions, and their findings favor the presence of surface water on the planet. Water on the planet's surface makes the existence of past or present life on Mars a little more likely, according to the group.

Sep 4, 2003

EO Bus Touts For Future Assignment

Denver - Sep 04, 2003 - Space Imaging is releasing two images of Mars taken by its Ikonos satellite as the red planet and Earth reached their closest proximity in nearly 60,000 years. At that point which occurred last week, Mars was 34.6 million miles (55.6 million kilometers) away.

Sep 4, 2003

NMSU Astronomer Analyzes Mars Rover Landing Sites

Las Cruces - Sep 03, 2003 - As telescopes around the world focus on Mars because of its historic nearness to Earth, two NASA spacecraft are hurtling toward the Red Planet to look for evidence that it might once have been wet enough to sustain life.

Sep 3, 2003

Dialing Up Mars

Moffett Field - Sep 01, 2003 - Leave it to Bill Nye the Science Guy to turn a traditional piece of calibration equipment into a really cool, state-of-the-art scientific instrument.

Sep 1, 2003

Astronomers Hunt Martian Water From Earth

Sydney - Aug 28, 2003 - As Mars makes its closest approach in almost 60,000 years, two Australian astronomers have used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawai'i to look for signs that the planet once had liquid water - and so may have hosted life.

Aug 28, 2003