When the Mars Polar Lander touches down today, it will aim for a spot detailed by data collected by the Mars Orbiter’s Laser Altimeter device.
September 10th, 1999
Climate Orbiter returns its first image of Mars explorezone.com
You’ll have to trust us on this one: This is a picture of Mars. This image, released today, is the first view of the Red Planet taken by the Mars Climate Orbiter, which is currently on its way to study our celestial neighbor.
September 8th, 1999
Surface images animate Martian dust devils explorezone.com
When the Mars Pathfinder return its cache of stunning images back in 1997, nobody was looking for dust devils, those swirling vortices of fine particles now thought to be a primary cause of the Red Planet’s severely hazy atmosphere.
September 2nd, 1999
Mars mound might have been built by microbes explorezone.com
If life ever existed on Mars, it may have left behind a massive calling card in the shape of a white rock mound covering over 200 square kilometres. According to a team of researchers in Scotland and Turkey, the mound looks very like those built by bacteria over 3 billion years ago here on Earth.
August 23rd, 1999
Future Martians might go back to living in caves explorezone.com
While a lot of noise has been made in recent years about the possibility of sending humans to Mars, R.D. “Gus” Frederick is thinking beyond the mere act of getting there. He’s thinking about where we’ll live after we set up camp. After all, it’s not like we can just live in a cave.
August 11th, 1999
Today’s forecast: More red dust explorezone.com
In a message to Congress in May 1961, President Kennedy proposed putting a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. The same message also requested $53 million to develop and deploy a system of weather satellites to monitor the atmosphere around the Earth. The first geostationary satellite began snapping half-globe pictures in 1966.