Mars

21 September 2007 -- A series of articles in a Science special section suggest that finding liquid water on the Red Planet may be more difficult than previously thought.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), launched in 2005 by NASA to study the hydrological history of Mars, has imaged geological features including craters, gullies, and river beds that scientists believe could have been formed by flowing water.    » read more »

Sept. 21, 2007 -- PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has discovered entrances to seven possible caves on the slopes of a Martian volcano. The find is fueling interest in potential underground habitats and sparking searches for caverns elsewhere on the Red Planet.    » read more »

Sept. 20, 2007 -- PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is examining several features on Mars that address the role of water at different times in Martian history.

Features examined with the orbiter's advanced instruments include material deposited in two gullies within the past eight years, polar ice layers formed in the recent geologic past, and signs of water released by large impacts when Mars was older.    » read more »

04 September 2007 -- Humans could get to Mars in less than 10 years, if they put their minds to it. That is the message of the Mars Society, a group of scientists and space enthusiasts who met recently in Los Angeles.

They came to see astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the first men on the moon, and to hear the ambitious plans of people like Elon Musk. The Internet pioneer has founded a company called SpaceX to put payloads into orbit, and eventually to take tourists into space.    » read more »

International partners are providing instruments for robotic vehicle

09 July 2007 -- Washington – NASA’s next mission to the surface of Mars is scheduled to launch in August on a 10-month voyage to find out if water frozen in the planet’s northern polar region ever has been able to sustain microbial life.

The Phoenix mission consists of a spacecraft partially built for NASA’s cancelled 2001 Mars Surveyor Program, and a robotic lander that carries an advanced set of research tools never before used on Mars.    » read more »

June 28, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is scheduled to begin a descent down a rock-paved slope into the Red Planet's massive Victoria Crater. This latest trek carries real risk for the long-lived robotic explorer, but NASA and the Mars Rover science team expect it to provide valuable science.    » read more »

Los Alamos ChemCam to vaporize rocks on Mars to determine composition

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 21, 2007 -- Mars mission Job One: Get there. Job Two: Find rocks and zap them with your laser tool. Now learn the nature of the debris by spectrographically analyzing the ensuing dust and fragments. It’s every kid’s dream, vaporizing pebbles on other planets, and thanks to a team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it’s going to happen.    » read more »

May 21, 2007 -- PASADENA, Calif. - A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water.

Members of the rover science team heard from a colleague during a recent teleconference that the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit's arm, had measured a composition of about 90 percent pure silica for this soil.    » read more »

April 13, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - After studying Mars four times as long as originally planned, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter appears to have succumbed to battery failure caused by a complex sequence of events involving the onboard computer memory and ground commands.

The causes were released today in a preliminary report by an internal review board. The board was formed to look more in-depth into why NASA's Mars Global Surveyor went silent in November 2006 and recommend any processes or procedures that could increase safety for other spacecraft.    » read more »