On July 17 the Mars rover Opportunity passed the twenty mile mark on its now seven year journey on Mars. The image below was taken on that day. In the distance, now only about 4,000 feet away, can be seen the rim of Endeavour Crater, fourteen miles wide. Opportunity has been traveling toward that crater now since 2008.
With the rover able to travel about 300 to 500 feet each sol, it should be reaching the crater’s rim sometime in the next few weeks.
NASA to announce on Friday the landing site of Curiousity, the next Mars rover.
Gale Crater now heads the list for Curiosity’s landing site on Mars.
Better buy that ticket now if you want to see the last shuttle launch from the best spot: Online prices have soared for space shuttle Atlantis launch tickets.
Tear-drop shaped mesas on Mars suggest ancient oceans to scientists.
Magnetic bubbles at the edge of the solar system.
Opportunity’s target on the rim of Endeavour crater has been dubbed “Spirit Point” by the science team in honor of the now defunct rover.
The Russian/ESA Mars 500 mission has completed a year of its 520-day simulated flight to Mars.
The crew, who spent 250 days working on maintenance and scientific experiments before a 30-day stint performing tasks on a simulated Martian surface, are currently on their “return trip” to Earth.
This simulated all-male flight is going better than the last:
In 1999, an experiment in the same Moscow warehouse fell to pieces after a Russian team captain forced a kiss on a Canadian woman, and two Russian crewmembers had a bloody fistfight.
Opportunity’s travels on Mars have now exceeded 30 kilometers.
Opportunity’s journey across the deserts of Mars continues; with pictures.
A bullet dodged? The next Mars rover, the Mars Science Lab, appears to be okay after last week’s mishap.
NASA has decided to abandon efforts to contact the rover Spirit, incommunicado for more than a year.
Facing a launch window that ends December 18, the next rover mission to Mars was damaged last week upon arriving at the Kennedy Space Center.
Deep fractures on Mars, some more than 1500 feet deep.
I believe him when he says he’ll launch his first manned mission in three years. However, I think he seriously underestimates the challenges of a mission to Mars, based on our present engineering abilities to build interplanetary spaceships.
Scientists find a gigantic and previously unknown deposit of CO2 at Mars’ south pole.
“We already knew there is a small perennial cap of carbon-dioxide ice on top of the water ice there, but this buried deposit has about 30 times more dry ice than previously estimated,” said Roger Phillips of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Phillips is deputy team leader for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Shallow Radar instrument and lead author of the report. . . . “When you include this buried deposit, Martian carbon dioxide right now is roughly half frozen and half in the atmosphere, but at other times it can be nearly all frozen or nearly all in the atmosphere,” Phillips said.
What this discovery means is that, depending on Mars’ orbital circumstances, its atmosphere can sometimes be dense enough for liquid water to flow on its surface.
Sounds crazy, but it’s true: The budget chaos at NASA has caused the ESA to halt work on its own Mars orbiter and rover.
Picking the landing spot for the next Mars rover: down to four finalists.
NASA’s last effort to re-establish contact with the Mars rover “Spirit.”
You can’t make this stuff up: The socialist leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, said today that he thinks capitalism is to blame for the lack of life on Mars.
The kapton tape used on the next Mars rover, Curiosity, releases enough methane of its own that it could mess up the rover’s other science.
The new colonial movement: China’s first probe to Mars is now set for a November launch.
This week’s release of cool images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter included the color image below of a region on the floor of Holden Crater, one of the four possible landing sites for Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory planned for launch later this year. (If you want to see the entire image at higher resolution, you can download it here.)
Two things that immediately stand out about this image (other than this looks like an incredibly spectacular place to visit):
