Mars mania has subsided for most of us, but it’s just beginning for one Australian National University scientist. Dr Javaan Chahl heads for California’s Mojave Desert this week where he will demonstrate to NASA a prototype of what he hopes will be the future in planetary exploration. So far, mobile exploration of other worlds has been restricted to the Apollo moon buggies of the 1970s and unmanned Mars rovers like 1997’s Sojourner. But ground-based exploration is slow and has limited range. The next generation of robotic explorers will soar in the pink Martian skies to pick out ground sites of interest.
August 23rd, 2003
The Beagle hasn’t landed yet, but Mars fever grips UK The Age
Professor Pillinger, a planetary scientist from Britain’s Open University, is the public face of Britain’s first mission to Mars. As the world’s amateur and professional skywatchers turn their gaze towards Mars on August 27, when it will be a mere 56 million kilometres away, his thoughts will be on the small payload of the European Space Agency’s orbiter, Mars Express. The Beagle 2 lander, named after Charles Darwin’s famous ship, has been six years and about
February 24th, 2003
Mars or Utah? Either way, it’s going to be cramped The Age
For her trip to Mars, Jennifer Laing is taking a copy of Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance and a DVD of The Dish. The Melbourne PhD student is one of six Australians who will spend the next few weeks inside an eight-metre cylinder parked in a Utah desert, researching life in a Martian colony. The members of the non-profit Mars Society will eat pre-packaged military food and sleep inside the two-storey Mars Desert Research Station, going outside twice a day to collect rocks and to look for microscopic life. They will also test spacesuits and two vehicles.
January 19th, 2003
NASA plans two-month manned dash to Mars The Age
The United States was hoping to send an astronaut to Mars in a nuclear-powered rocket within eight years, said a senior NASA official. Under the space agency’s ambitious plan, the project would involve a two-month journey to Mars in a spaceship travelling at three times the present speed of space travel.
December 6th, 2002
Hopes for life on Mars recede The Age
In the ongoing battle between the wet and dry-Marsers, competing theories ebb and flow. Robert Cooke reports from New York. A new look at the bumps, basins and flow channels on Mars suggests the red planet, though sometimes awash with water, has been too cold and too dry to ever get life going.