NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found bright veins of a mineral, apparently gypsum, deposited by water. Analysis of the vein will help improve understanding of the history of wet environments on Mars. “This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through...
Viking Mars Research...
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NASA has repeatedly stated that its new mission to Mars, Curiosity, carries no life detector. Yet, Gilbert V. Levin, Experimenter on NASA’s 1976 Viking Mission, disagrees. He says instruments aboard Curiosity can confirm his published claim that his Labeled Release (LR) experiment...
Mars Science Laborat...
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NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory is tucked inside its Atlas V rocket, ready for launch on Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Nov. 26 launch window extends from 7:02 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. PST (10:02 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. EST). The launch period for the...
NASA Launches Most C...
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NASA began a historic voyage to Mars with the Nov. 26 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, which carries a car-sized rover named Curiosity. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V rocket occurred at 10:02 a.m. EST (7:02 a.m. PST). “We are very excited about...
NASA Ready For November Launch of Mars Rover
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NASA’s most advanced mobile robotic laboratory, which will examine one of the most intriguing areas on Mars, is in final preparations for a launch from Florida’s Space Coast at 10:25 a.m. EST (7:25 a.m. PST) on Nov. 25. The Mars Science Laboratory mission will carry Curiosity, a rover with more scientific capability than any ever sent to another planet. The rover is now sitting atop an Atlas V rocket awaiting liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. “Preparations are on track for launching at our first opportunity,” said Pete Theisinger, Mars Science Laboratory project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion...
Mars Rover Carries D...
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An instrument on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity can check for any water that might be bound into shallow underground minerals along the rover’s path. “If we conclude that there is something unusual in the subsurface at a particular spot, we could suggest more analysis of the...
The Landing-Site Specialist
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Gale crater has been sitting just below the equator of Mars, minding its own business, for at least three and half billion years. But in August 2012, a capsule is going to come screaming out of the sky, then brake its fall by popping a parachute and engaging rocket thrusters. After that, the “sky crane” inside the capsule will activate to lower the subcompact-car-sized Curiosity rover on tethers, suspending it beneath the rest of the craft until the whole assembly descends onto a carefully chosen patch of ground at the northwestern end of the 96-mile-diameter crater. This is how Goddard’s Jim Rice describes the arrival of...
Curiosity: Expendabl...
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NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, gets ready to be encapsulated and transported to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Fla., later this month. At Launch Complex 41, the Atlas V rocket was moved from the Vertical Integration Facility to the launch pad on...
Video Documents Thre...
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While NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity was traveling from Victoria crater to Endeavour crater, between September 2008 and August 2011, the rover team took an end-of-drive image on each Martian day that included a drive. A new video compiles these 309 images, providing an...
Mars Science Laborat...
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In preparation for launch later this year, the “back shell powered descent vehicle” configuration containing NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, has been placed on the spacecraft’s heat shield. The matchup was performed by technicians at NASA’s...
NASA Mars Rovers Win...
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More than seven years after completing their three-month prime missions on opposite sides of Mars, NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been selected for lifetime achievement award honors as part of the Breakthrough Awards presented by Popular Mechanics magazine. The magazine today...
NASA Rover Inspects Next Rock at Endeavour
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NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is using instruments on its robotic arm to inspect targets on a rock called “Chester Lake.” This is the second rock the rover has examined with a microscopic imager and a spectrometer since reaching its long-term destination, the rim of vast Endeavour crater, in August. Unlike the first rock, which was a boulder tossed by excavation of a small crater on Endeavour’s rim, Chester Lake is an outcrop of bedrock. The rocks at Endeavour apparently come from an earlier period of Martian history than the rocks that Opportunity examined during its first seven-and-a-half years on...
Memorial Image Taken...
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A view of a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers was taken on Mars yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The memorial, made from aluminum recovered from the site of the twin towers in weeks following the attacks, serves as a cable...
Tributes to Terroris...
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In September 2001, Honeybee Robotics employees in lower Manhattan were building a pair of tools for grinding weathered rinds off rocks on Mars, so that scientific instruments on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity could inspect the rocks’ interiors. That...
Microbe Risk When Ro...
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Earth microbes trying to make it to Mars must survive sterilization in NASA’s clean rooms, harsh cosmic rays during months of space travel, and the Red Planet’s unforgiving surface environment. But any bacteria that successfully hitchhike aboard the wheels of NASA’s Mars...
Finishing Work at Ti...
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Opportunity is continuing the in-situ (contact) investigation of rocks around the rim of Endeavour crater. On Sol 2697 (Aug. 25, 2011), the rover bumped a mere 0.15 meters (about 6 inches) to reposition at the large ejecta block, named “Tinsdale 2.” This allowed Opportunity to...
NASA’s Mars Ro...
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The initial work of NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity at its new location on Mars shows surface compositional differences from anything the robot has studied in its first 7.5 years of exploration. Opportunity arrived three weeks ago at the rim of a 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) crater...
Launch Preparations Report
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NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Project continues to press ahead with launch preparation activities, planning to use additional time before encapsulating the rover in the launch vehicle’s nose cone. Officials want to maintain additional schedule margin for enhanced safety procedures in assembly and testing. System testing put the rover and other parts of the spacecraft through simulations of many activities from launch through operations on Mars’ surface. Aspects of the test simulating the final moments before landing took longer than scheduled. Additional margin that had been built into the schedule has been consumed in...
New Rover Snapshots ...
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Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has captured new images of intriguing Martian terrain from a small crater near the rim of the large Endeavour crater. The rover arrived at the 13-mile-diameter (21-kilometer-diameter) Endeavour on Aug. 9, after a journey of almost three years. Opportunity...
NASA Prepares Next M...
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NASA’s next Mars rover, the car-size Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, is almost ready to fly to the Red Planet. Beginning tomorrow (Aug. 13), technicians at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida will begin folding up the six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover to pack it inside its heat...
NASA Mars Rover Arri...
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After a journey of almost three years, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reached the Red Planet’s Endeavour crater to study rocks never seen before. On Aug. 9, the golf cart-sized rover relayed its arrival at a location named Spirit Point on the crater’s rim....
NASA Mars Rover Appr...
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The NASA Mars rover Opportunity has gained a view of Endeavour crater from barely more than a football-field’s distance away from the rim. The rim of Endeavour has been the mission’s long-term goal since mid-2008. Endeavour offers the setting for plenty of productive work by...
Evidence Builds For Water on Mars
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NASA has chosen a landing site for its next Mars rover with the goal of seeking more signs of historical water on the planet, and a recent study suggests it may find it.New evidence of Mars’ watery past has surfaced, NASA scientists say, suggesting that telltale signs of the wet stuff may lurk under thin layers of rust seen scattered around the Red Planet, in areas that mirror conditions found in Earth’s desert regions. That’s good news for NASA’ Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, which will be launched toward the planet later this year. The rover will land in Gale Crater, the space agency announced Friday...