If you
May 22nd, 2000
U.K. to Launch Mars Probe
As NASA scales back its immediate plans to explore Mars, it
May 22nd, 2000
Europe Boards The Mars Express
As NASA reshapes a future Mars exploration agenda, the European Space Agency is moving out on a fast-track mission, its first to the Red Planet. Called the Mars Express, this faster-better-cheaper pedigree of a planetary probe is already touted as pepping up space science in Europe.
May 21st, 2000
Will Nuclear Power Put Humans On Mars?
Antimatter propulsion, solar and magnetic sails all make great stories, but such futuristic concepts don’t do anything to get humans out to the moon, or Mars, or to various local comets or asteroids within the foreseeable future. So when planners at NASA begin to examine space-travel goals beyond low Earth orbit, beyond 2005 when the International Space Station is scheduled to be complete, they are faced with making bigger, brawnier and incredibly more expensive versions of the chemical rockets in use today. Either that, or consider a demonstrated technology that was abandoned almost 30 years ago: nuclear rocket engines.
May 12th, 2000
Pathfinder to Return to Mars?
NASA may send a modified version of its wildly successful Pathfinder spacecraft on a repeat journey to Mars in 2003, relying on that mission
May 9th, 2000
NASA’s Dog Days: FIDO Mars Rover’s Desert Trek
Using an anonymous patch of the American West as a stand-in for Mars, NASA has begun the second field tests of an advanced rover prototype developed to help it explore the Red Planet.
April 29th, 2000
Russia’s Race to Mars
Soviet policy makers have wanted to go to Mars since the late 1960s. That’s when it became clear that the race to the moon was lost and their main focus switched to long-term human spaceflight.
April 27th, 2000
Life Detection Technology Gets Room to Grow
The back-to-back failures last year of U.S. Mars missions now give scientists time to blueprint a credible and step-by-step search for life on the Red Planet. Without the pressure to return martian samples to Earth any time soon, new schemes for automated, on-the-spot detection of past or present Mars life can be flown.