Pasadena - Nov 11, 2003 - The Planetary Society is mobilizing its members and the general public to write President Bush in support of a human space exploration program geared towards the ultimate goal of landing men and women on Mars.
Pasadena - Nov 11, 2003 - Marsapalooza, part of NASA's Mars 2004 (M2K4) effort to promote the Mars Exploration Rovers mission and NASA Mars education initiatives, is a tour during which a team of youthful scientists and engineers (the M-Team) will visit five cities across the country to raise public literacy about the Mars mission, to reach out to students in underserved communities, and to present themselves as role models to inspire the next generation of explorers.
Moffett Field - Nov 10, 2003 - A team of scientists from NASA, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Louisiana State University and several other research organizations has discovered clues from one of Earth's driest deserts about the limits of life on Earth, and why past missions to Mars may have failed to detect life.
Pasadena - Nov 05, 2003 - A series of tests of one of the science instruments on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has enabled engineers and scientists to identify how to work around an apparent problem detected in August.
Seattle - Nov 04, 2003 - Mars is kind of like Texas: things are just bigger there. In addition to the biggest canyon and biggest volcano in the solar system, Mars has now been found to have sand ripples twice as tall as they would be on Earth.
Moffett Field - Oct 31, 2003 - NASA scientists and engineers are testing new technologies using the K9 rover in a granite quarry near Watsonville, Calif., in preparation for future missions to Mars.
Images taken from orbit on Mars show good evidence for the effects of erosion and flowing (fluvial) water at one time in the martian past.
Sydney - Oct 29, 2003 - NASA has collected over 100,000 images from Mars. Many are breathtaking, and all the folk there deserve a standing ovation. But maybe they have not done quite as fine a job of interpreting them. For several years, NASA has contended that, in the distant past, rivers of liquid water flowed on Mars and that vast oceans resulted.
Washington - Oct 24, 2003 - Mars came nearer to Earth this year than it has in more than 50,000 years, but a new technology could bring it closer still. Scientists have developed a fully sustainable disposal system to deal with waste on long-range space flights using a simple byproduct of wheat.
Tempe - Oct 24, 2003 - The presence of a common green mineral on Mars suggests that the red planet could have been cold and dry since the mineral has been exposed, which may be more than a billion years according to new research appearing in the Oct. 24 edition of Science.
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.
On Mars, three instruments will work together to perform remote analysis of the rock and soil that the Mars rovers encounter.
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.
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?
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.
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.
