It’s the Martian version of spring break: Curiosity and Opportunity, along with their spacecraft friends circling overhead, will take it easy this month because of the sun’s interference.
For much of April, the sun blocks the line of sight between Earth and Mars. This celestial alignment — called a Mars solar conjunction — makes it difficult for engineers to send instructions or hear from the flotilla in orbit and on the surface.
Such communication blackouts occur every two years when the red planet disappears behind the sun. No new commands are sent since flares and charged particles spewing from the sun can scramble transmission signals and put spacecraft in danger.
April 4th, 2013
Mars missions scaled back in April because of sun
March 6th, 2013
Curiosity sleeps as solar blast races toward Mars
Curiosity hunkered down Wednesday after the sun unleashed a blast that raced toward Mars.
While the hardy rover was designed to withstand punishing space weather, its handlers decided to power it down as a precaution since it suffered a recent computer problem.
“We’re being more careful,” said project manager Richard Cook of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs the $2.5 billion mission.
While Curiosity slept, the Opportunity rover and two NASA spacecraft circling overhead carried on with normal activities.
January 31st, 2012
Russia blames radiation for space probe failure
The head of Russia’s space agency said Tuesday that cosmic radiation was the most likely cause of the failure of a Mars moon probe that crashed to Earth this month, and suggested that a low-quality imported component may have been vulnerable to the radiation. The unmanned Phobos-Grunt probe was to have gone to the Mars moon of Phobos, taken soil samples and brought them back. But it became stuck in Earth orbit soon after its launch on Nov. 9. It fell out of orbit on Jan. 15, reportedly off the coast of Chile, but no fragments have been found.
The failure was a severe embarrassment to Russia, and Popovkin initially suggested it could have been due to foreign sabotage.
But on Tuesday he said in televised remarks that an investigation showed the probable cause was “localized influence of heavily radiated space particles.”
July 7th, 2011
Mars landing site narrowed down to two candidates
NASA is deciding between two places on Mars to send its next rover.
The space agency said that the project team and outside scientists have narrowed the options and that a final decision on the destination for the nuclear-powered rover nicknamed Curiosity will likely be made by the end of the month. The rover will touch down either in Gale Crater near the Martian equator or the Eberswalde crater in the planet’s southern hemisphere.
June 25th, 2008
Scientists think big impact caused two-faced Mars
Why is Mars two-faced? Scientists say fresh evidence supports the theory that a monster impact punched the red planet, leaving behind perhaps the largest gash on any heavenly body in the solar system.
Today, the Martian surface has a split personality. The southern hemisphere of Mars is pockmarked and filled with ancient rugged highlands. By contrast, the northern hemisphere is smoother and covered by low-lying plains.
Three papers in Thursday’s journal Nature provide the most convincing evidence yet that an outside force was responsible.
According to the researchers, an asteroid or comet whacked a young Mars some 4 billion years ago, blasting away much of its northern crust and creating a giant hole over 40 percent of the surface.
New calculations reveal the crater known as the Borealis basin measures 5,300 miles across and 6,600 miles long — the size of Asia, Europe and Australia combined. It’s believed to be four times bigger than the current titleholder, the South Pole-Aitken basin on Earth’s moon.
June 18th, 2008
Mars team ponders whether lander sees ice or salt
Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt? That’s the question bedeviling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix lander began digging into Mars’ north pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable.
Shallow trenches excavated by the lander’s backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt.
Phoenix merged two previously dug trenches over the weekend into a single pit measuring a little over a foot long and 3 inches deep. The new trench was excavated at the edge of a polygon-shaped pattern in the ground that may have been formed by the seasonal melting of underground ice.
May 25th, 2008
NASA spacecraft successfully lands on Mars
A NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed in the Red Planet’s northern polar region on Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life. Cheers swept through mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nailbiting descent. Engineers and scientists hugged and high-fived one another
May 25th, 2008
A look at NASA’s latest mission to the red planet
NASA has successfully landed five robots on Mars over the past three decades. Its latest spacecraft, Phoenix Mars, will touch down in the Martian arctic region on Sunday. Here’s why NASA is going again.
January 14th, 2008
No big bang: Asteroid will miss Mars
The possibility of a collision between Mars and an approaching asteroid has been effectively ruled out, according to scientists watching the space rock. Tracking measurements of asteroid 2007 WD5 taken from four observatories have greatly reduced uncertainties about its Jan. 30 close approach to Mars so that the odds of impact have dropped to 1 in 10,000, the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a posting on its Web site Thursday.
December 21st, 2007
Asteroid May Hit Mars Next Month
Mars could be in for an asteroid hit.
A newly discovered hunk of space rock has a 1 in 75 chance of slamming into the Red Planet on Jan. 30, scientists said Thursday.
“These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track … threatening asteroids,” said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The asteroid, known as 2007 WD5, was discovered in late November and is similar in size to an object that hit remote central Siberia in 1908, unleashing energy equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb and wiping out 60 million trees.
Scientists tracking the asteroid, currently halfway between Earth and Mars, initially put the odds of impact at 1 in 350 but increased the chances this week. Scientists expect the odds to diminish again early next month after getting new observations of the asteroid’s orbit, Chesley said.
“We know that it’s going to fly by Mars and most likely going to miss, but there’s a possibility of an impact,” he said.