In the world of rocks that have fallen to Earth from space, meteorites from Mars and our moon are scarcer than hen
June 2nd, 2000
Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Brings Mars Closer to Earth
Ever wanted to rove across Mars in the year 2130? Now you can at the National Air and Space Museum, which has added four, eight-person flight simulators to put passengers behind aircraft controls in a Navy jet and in the seat of a martian rover.
June 1st, 2000
Concepts And Approaches For Mars Exploration
NASA’s Space Science Enterprise is openly considering all facets of its Mars Exploration Program starting with the 2005 opportunity and carrying through 15 years and beyond. In order to cast a wide net for capturing ideas and potential participants for missions, mission elements, and experiments that fit within the broadly defined scope of this program, NASA is sponsoring a two-and-a-half-day workshop to be held at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), which is housed in the Center for Advanced Space Studies, 3600 Bay Area Boulevard, Houston, Texas. The dates for this workshop are July 18-20, 2000.
May 30th, 2000
Last Chance to Become a Student Scientist with Red Rover Goes to Mars The Planetary Society
Time is running out. The Planetary Society’s Red Rover Goes to Mars program will soon select Student Scientists to join the space science team of an actual Mars mission. Students worldwide, ages 9 to 15 years old, can enter contests to become Student Scientists or Student Navigators on the Red Rover Goes to Mars Team.
May 25th, 2000
Rare Mars meteorite discovered in Middle East
A meteorite hunter combing the deserts of Oman found a stone thought to have originated on Mars. Of the 20,000 known meteorite discoveries, the brownish gray stone is only the 15th identified as coming from the red planet, scientists said this week.
May 22nd, 2000
Martian meteorite found in Oman
A brownish grey stone weighing 1,056 grams (2.3 lbs) is thought to be only the 15th known meteorite to originate from Mars. The discovery, made on 24 January this year in the Dhofar region of Oman, is extremely rare. Of the estimated 20,000 known meteorites, only a handful are confirmed as having come from the Red Planet or the Moon.
May 7th, 2000
NASA Changes Mars Exploration Plans
After a pair of high-profile Mars mission flops, NASA is rethinking its approach to the Red Planet in an unprecedented review that includes everything from science and technology to management and bureaucracy. When the soul-searching is done, officials say they will have reinvented the program that helped doom the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter and the $165 million Polar Lander.
May 5th, 2000
Planetary Pileup: Out of Sight, Out of Mind
The good news is that on May 5th the Moon and the five bright planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — will come together to form an impressively tight grouping in the sky. The bad news is that we won’t able to see it, because the Sun is in the midst of the parade of planets and will hide most of them in its dazzling glare. An even tighter configuration — this time without the Moon — will occur (again out of view) on the 17th.
April 29th, 2000
NASA Is Designing A Black Box Flight Data Recorder For Its Mars Missions New Scientist
NASA is preparing for disaster. The space agency is taking a leaf out of the airline industry’s book and is designing a “black box” flight data recorder for all its future Mars missions. The hope is that a lot of the guesswork can be taken out of any inquiry into a future failed mission.
April 26th, 2000
Talking Lower Cost
How do you explore the solar system for less money – and what can we learn from this next generation of space missions? To this end more than 300 experts from around the world will address these and related topics during the fourth International Conference on Low-Cost Planetary Missions, May 2-5, 2000, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, USA.