NASA’s Office of Space Science has selected a group of University of Colorado at Boulder researchers to spend three years mapping the polar ice on Mars using satellite data. The research team from the National Snow and Ice Data Center will create a “virtual sensor” by combining data from two instruments currently orbiting the Red Planet on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor satellite, said principal investigator and glaciologist Anne Nolin. The scientists will apply remote-sensing techniques to study the Mars data and help them to both identify the surface composition of Mars’ polar ice and plot its perimeters.
September 17th, 1998
New Research Places Mars Bulk Composition In Question CU Press Release
Rethinking The C1 Carbonaceous Chondrite Standard. New analysis of data from the Mars Pathfinder Mission has revived a nagging question that was first posed nearly 50 years ago: why do the inner planets exhibit different mean densities when presumably they formed from the same material? The new analysis, performed at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, suggests that one current theory explaining density variations is wrong, and that future modelers of inner solar system accretion must account for a set of inner planets with differing elemental compositions.