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