AMC is going to Mars. Hot on the heels of its Emmy wins for Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the cable channel is making its move into sci-fi by developing a new series based on Red Mars, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Writer-producer Jonathan Hensleigh (Armageddon, Die Hard: With a Vengeance) will be in charge of adapting Kim Stanley Robinson's classic 1992 novel, which describes a team of humans as they attempt to colonize the planet.

With the fortunes of Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Center now heavily tied to President Bush’s plan to send astronauts to the moon and Mars, the upcoming election has the center’s employees and supporters watching for hints of the direction either candidate might take the nation’s space program. So far, both Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama have staked out positions that sound hopeful for the once-faltering Glenn center, and for the overall American space effort. In unusual detail for a presidential campaign, each candidate has pledged support for the moon- Mars exploration goal. Obama and McCain have promised, in principle, to provide the billions it will take to build new spacecraft, establish a permanent moon base, and propel astronauts to the rusty, intriguing surface of Mars.

NASA chief Mike Griffin has outlined the punishing lunar endurance mission that would have to be completed before NASA could ever consider sending humans to Mars. Speaking on NASA's future mission priorities at this week's International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow, Scotland, Griffin said that Mars is not automatically the next destination simply because humans have already been to the Moon. "The total human experience on the Moon is less than 27 human working days – on a world that is the size of Africa," he says. "So whether the Moon is a stepping stone to Mars or a place of interest in its own right depends on knowledge we don't have yet." To improve that knowledge, and to test the logistics and human factors of potential Mars missions in the bargain, Griffin proposes an elaborate lunar mission experiment. It would mimic the travel and landing time of a Mars mission by using the International Space Station as a mock Mars spaceship – and the Moon as a surrogate Mars.

NASA scientists hope to hear what it sounds like on the surface of Mars for the first time when they attempt to switch on the Phoenix Mars Lander's microphone in the next week or two, mission leaders announced on Monday. "This is definitely a first," said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Phoenix's microphone is a part of the Mars Descent Imager system that was included on the underside of the lander to take downward-looking images during the three minutes of descent before the spacecraft touched down on the planet's surface. The MARDI on Phoenix was originally designed for the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander missions, which were eventually canceled. The system is also similar to the one aboard 1999's ill-fated Mars Polar Lander. The plan to use the imager and microphone on May 25 (when Phoenix landed) were scrapped when tests showed that using the system would create an unacceptable risk to a safe landing for Phoenix.

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft has discovered evidence of past water at its Martian landing site and spotted falling snow for the first time, scientists reported Monday. Soil experiments revealed the presence of two minerals known to be formed in liquid water. Scientists identified the minerals as calcium carbonate, found in limestone and chalk, and sheet silicate. But exactly how that happened remains a mystery. "It's really kind of all up in the air," said William Boynton, a mission scientist at the University of Arizona at Tucson. A laser aboard the Phoenix recently detected snow falling from clouds more than two miles above its home in the northern arctic plains. The snow disappeared before reaching the ground.

A NASA probe has spotted hundreds of small surface fractures near Mars' equator that may have acted as underground natural plumbing to channel groundwater billions of years ago. Geologists compare the fractures in the sandstone rock deposits on Mars to features called deformation bands on Earth, which can arise from the influence of groundwater in the underground bedrock. The bands and faults have strong influences on groundwater movement on Earth, and seem to have played the same role on Mars. Other research has examined how surface water from rain or snow shaped the planet surface, but many agree that groundwater has an equally important influence. "Groundwater often flows along fractures such as these, and knowing that these are deformation bands helps us understand how the underground plumbing may have worked within these layered deposits," said Chris Okubo, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. who headed up a new study of the Martian fractures.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, has returned more than 8,214 gigapixel-size images of the Martian surface since the start of the science phase of the mission in November 2006. HiRISE scientists released 1,005 observations of Mars made between April 26 and July 21 to NASA's mission data archive, called the Planetary Data System, and also to the public last week. The new images, a total 3.4 terabytes of data, can be found on the HiRISE Web site. The HiRISE team has so far released a total 26.9 terabytes of data in more than 7,100 observations with 718,000 different image products derived from those observations, said HiRISE operations manager Eric Eliason of The University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. That amounts to more data than has been released by all previous deep space missions combined. The image products include color images and stereo pairs, as well as monochrome images. "If I showed each HiRISE image for 10 seconds, it would take me about 4 years to show them all," said UA's Alfred McEwen, HiRISE principal investigator. Despite this massive data volume, HiRISE images cover less than four-fifths of one percent of the area of the planet.

Listen up…to Mars! Word from the trenches is that the Phoenix lander team is going forward with turning on the spacecraft’s microphone. Phoenix, like the lost-to-Mars 1999 Polar Lander, carried a tiny microphone to hear the sounds of the descent to the red planet. The microphone is part of the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) system built by Malin Space Science Systems, but for Phoenix was turned off due to the small risk that it could trip up a critical landing system. But the go-ahead has been given to turn the microphone on, right there on-the-spot at the Phoenix Martian polar north landing spot. Other good news is that NASA has given the lander an extended lease on life for an additional two months - into November.

Obviously the design criteria for four wheeled vehicles are somewhat different on other planets. This has yielded some of the most bizarre and fascinating vehicles ever proposed, from the giant Mobility Test Article test driven by Wernher von Braun to today's rovers which have ditched the most expensive component of all, the driver. Here are a variety of some of both classic and unusual space rovers from prototype to flown.

NASA chose a University of Colorado proposal for a $485 million Mars mission on Monday after a nine-month delay caused by a conflict of interest in the selection process. The delay cost the space agency time, money and science. The price of the probe increased by $10 million, its launch was postponed by two years, and the science-gathering mission will be cut in half to one year, an official said. NASA chose the University of Colorado's proposal to study the Martian atmosphere from 20 other ideas to study Mars that were trimmed to just two before a conflict of interest was declared. NASA has not disclosed what the conflict of interest was or who it involved, other than to say last year that it was not created by NASA but by one of the two groups. The space agency said last December that a "serious" conflict of interest in one of two proposals forced it to disband the board formed to pick the winner, and create a new panel to award the contract.