If the Spirit rover were your typical 1-year-old, there’d be lots of pictures of the happy tot, perhaps even with a frosting-smeared face. Of course, Spirit is a bot, not a tot, and this is definitely not your typical birthday. In fact, Sunday’s big day actually marked 687 Earth days of operations on the Red Planet
August 1st, 2005
Hopping on Mars
Imagine a rocket plane that can sail for dozens of miles over the Martian terrain, set itself down, send out a robotic explorer for a month or so, then take off for the next destination. It may sound like pure science fiction
June 3rd, 2005
Postcards from Mars
NASA’s Opportunity rover is still struggling to break free from a Martian sand dune, and half a world away, the Spirit rover is delving deeply into the geology of Gusev Crater. As a result, the Mars mission teams seem to be in a head-down, nose-to-the-grindstone mode. Nevertheless, NASA is releasing Red Planet imagery that ranks high on the coolness scale.
March 30th, 2005
Make your own Mars rover
The Martian Soil blog points the way to Web sites that show you how to assemble a downsized paper version of the NASA Mars rovers, as well as a true-scale paper “MarsDial” like the one on each rover (PDF file). All you have to do is print out a copy of the pattern, then painstakingly cut out the pieces and glue them together.
March 24th, 2005
Scientist at center of Mars flap speaks out
Carol Stoker thought she was talking casually to friends at a party. A NASA scientist, Stoker and her husband and colleague Larry Lemke described work they were doing looking for biological activity
March 14th, 2005
Dust devils caught on Mars
Even though Mars’ atmosphere is only about 1 percent as dense as Earth’s, there’s still enough air to whip up whirlwinds known as dust devils. NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor has tracked the mini-tornadoes from orbit, but they’ve never been spotted from ground level. Until now. Last week, after more than a year of watching, the Spirit rover captured a couple of wisps making their way across the desolation of Gusev Crater, said a member of the rover science team, Geoffrey Landis of NASA’s Glenn Research Center. “In some of the navigation camera images, we actually spotted two dust devils, and one of those dust devils was visible in the rear hazcam,” Landis said.
February 13th, 2005
Does Mars need women? Russians say no
Are women up to the job of exploring Mars? This week, the director of Russia
February 8th, 2005
Panoramas show rovers
It’s been weeks since the Mars rovers marked their anniversaries on the Red Planet, but the happy returns are still being processed back on Earth. Over the past few days, the rover team has released jaw-dropping, true-color panoramas from Spirit as well as Opportunity. The Opportunity rover’s panorama shows the place where its heat shield crashed during the probe’s descent a little more than a year ago, making a light reddish mark on the brick-red plain called Meridiani Planum.
January 7th, 2005
Are astronauts obsolete?
No way, says Steve Squyres, the top scientist for the Mars rover missions. You might think Squyres would feel a bit of sympathy with the sentiment expressed in “The Matrix” by Agent Smith, the movie’s virtual-reality villain: “Never send a human to do a machine’s job.” After all, Squyres serves as the principal investigator for the wildly successful robotic Mars adventure, which has lasted a year as of today. But in a recent interview, the Cornell University astronomer said that human exploration has to be a central part of our effort to figure out what’s going on in the universe.
December 21st, 2004
Mystery Martian
A phenomenon akin to a space-borne car wash has boosted the performance of one of the two NASA rovers probing the surface of Mars. Layers of dust have been swept from the solar panels of the Mars Opportunity vehicle while it was closed down during the Martian night. The cleaning boosted the panels’ power output close to their maximum 900 watt-hours per day, after at one stage dropping to 500 watt-hours because of the heavy Martian dirt.