The six-wheeled rover inches over the gravel of a wind-swept hillside, carefully avoiding boulders and precipices in a slow-motion hunt for a rock that struck the fancy of distant planetary scientists. But there’s a problem. One of the steel-cleated wheels is dragging like a broken shopping cart, and the engineers in Pasadena can’t figure out what’s wrong. They beam commands to budge the faraway robot back and forth, left and right. No luck.
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.
February 18th, 2000
Flaw Found in Mars Lander’s Design
Engines controlling the final descent of the Mars Polar Lander might have shut off prematurely, sending the $165 million probe crashing to the planet’s surface, according to a new scenario being investigated by scientists.
January 12th, 2000
Organic Molecules in Space Found
A primordial soup of complex organic chemicals that could be the precursors of life is cooked up very quickly after the birth of stars, new research suggests. Another international team has made calculations that suggest that life could have arisen on Mars and then been transferred to Earth by meteorites jolted away from the surface of Mars by asteroid impacts. Early in solar system history, it is also calculated that up a trillion Earth rocks were blasted into space and traveled to Mars. This means that life from Earth could have once seeded Mars. “Because of the heavy traffic between Earth and Mars, we couldn’t decide which came first,” Martian life on Earth, or the reverse, said Mileikowsky.
January 6th, 2000
Mars lander may have broke apart
The vanished Mars Polar Lander probably broke apart in a canyon, The Denver Post reported today, citing scientists who suggested the landing site was the reason for NASA’s latest failure. The $165 million lander was supposed to touch down Dec. 3 for a 90-day mission to analyze the planet’s atmosphere and search for frozen water beneath its south pole. It has not been heard from since it started its descent after an 11-month cruise, and NASA has not offered a reason for the disappearance.
December 30th, 1999
Technology, confidence brought conquest of space
It was a time when the word “impossible” did not exist. That’s the way Gene Cernan remembers it. Another astronaut, Walter Cunningham, recalls, “We not only believed that we could fly a new spacecraft that they shipped down here, we thought we could fly the crates they shipped them in.” They’re talking about the heady days of NASA’s Apollo program that put men on the moon, regarded by many as the greatest single achievement of the 20th century and one of the outstanding human endeavors of all time.
December 10th, 1999
Researchers Suspect Mars Had Ocean
Scientists studying polar areas of Mars have found features that might once have been an ancient coastline. The theory that the Red Planet once had water has long been of interest to scientists, and a group led by James W. Head III of Brown University searched data collected by Mars Global Surveyor for confirmation.
December 6th, 1999
Hope Fades for Mars Polar Lander
With hope fading fast for the Mars Polar Lander, NASA investigators may have to face the possibility of never really knowing what went wrong with the spacecraft 157 million miles from Earth.
September 13th, 1999
Mars Climate Orbiter snaps first picture
The first picture snapped by a camera aboard the Mars Climate Orbiter shows the red planet from 2.8 million miles away looking like a tiny, out-of-focus piece of elbow macaroni.
August 27th, 1999
Scientists examine water found inside meteorite
Scientists who cracked open a meteorite that fell to Earth last year found tiny pockets of briny water, providing the first close look at water not originating on earth, according to an article in the journal Science. While astronomers have long thought that water flowed through asteroids and other bodies formed at the beginning of the solar system, the meteorite’s liquid cargo offered the first chance to actually study it in a lab.