MARS

he High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded a scene on Jan. 29, 2012, that includes the first color image from orbit showing the three-petal lander of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit mission. Spirit drove off that lander platform in January 2004 and spent most of its six-year working life in a range of hills about two miles to the east. Another recent image from HiRISE, taken on Jan. 26, 2012, shows NASA's Phoenix Mars...Read Full Story

Some images of stark Martian landscapes provide visual appeal beyond their science value, including a recent scene of wind-sculpted features from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This enhanced-color image shows sand dunes trapped in an impact crater in Noachis Terra, Mars. Dunes and sand ripples of various shapes and sizes display the natural beauty created by physical processes. The area covered in the image is about...Read Full Story

Winter Wonderland : Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rover entering its ninth year operating on the Red Planet, has returned this view from its winter resting place on the rim of Endeavour Crater. Part of a larger 360-degree panorama still being collected, this composite of smaller images looks north toward the stretch of Endeavour's rim known as Cape York, which forms an arc across the top half of the view. Rippled sand and wind-sculpted formations are visible inside the crater. Opportunity...Read Full Story

Eight years after landing on Mars for what was planned as a three-month mission, NASA's enduring Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is working on what essentially became a new mission five months ago. Opportunity reached a multi-year driving destination, Endeavour Crater, in August 2011. At Endeavour's rim, it has gained access to geological deposits from an earlier period of Martian history than anything it examined during its first seven years. It also has begun an investigation of the...Read Full Story

One of NASA's twin Grail spacecraft has returned its first unique picture of the far side of the moon, an image that shows shadowed craters at the moon's south pole. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech View full size image A gravity-mapping spacecraft orbiting the moon has beamed home its first video of the lunar far side — a view people on Earth never see. The new video was captured by one of NASA's twin Grail probes using a novel camera called MoonKAM, which will eventually be used by students on...Read Full Story

Curiosity Rover, on its Way to Mars, Finds Out What a Solar Storm Feels Like : MSL, Cruising NASA/JPL-Caltech Radiation data gathered by the rover's instruments could inform future manned spacecraft designs Last week's solar eruption and resulting radiation bombardment--the biggest recorded in seven years--made its presence felt here on Earth via altered flight paths for some planes in the Northern Hemisphere and a certain degree of hand-wringing over the health of satellites in the solar...Read Full Story

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity will spend the next few months during the coldest part of Martian winter at Greeley Haven, an outcrop of rock on Mars recently named informally to honor ASU Regents' Professor Ronald Greeley, a planetary geologist who died Oct. 27, 2011. Photographed in false color to emphasize differences in composition, the rocks of Greeley Haven stand out in blue-gray tints. In the background at right lies a tan patch of sand. While Opportunity is parked here...Read Full Story

ASU’s Center for Meteorite Studies has acquired a significant new sample for its collection: a rare Martian meteorite that fell in southern Morocco in July 2011. It is the first Martian fall in about 50 years. ASU currently owns the largest institutional piece of the martian meteorite Tissint. Photo by: Laurence Garvie Since the observed fall of the famed Ensisheim meteorite in 1492, there have been 1,200 recovered meteorite falls. A “fall” is a meteorite that was witnessed by...Read Full Story

The upper panel is a radargram profile from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), showing data from the subsurface of Mars in the ice-rich north polar plateau of Mars.  Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Rome/ASI/GSFC A ground-penetrating radar instrument that NASA helped develop for the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter has completed a five-month campaign of observing subsurface layering in the north polar ice cap of Mars. The...Read Full Story

Dust avalanches around impact craters on Mars appear to be the result of the shock wave preceding the actual impact, according to a study led by an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona (UA). When a meteorite careens toward the dusty surface of the Red Planet, it kicks up dust and can cause avalanching even before the rock from outer space hits the ground, a research team led by an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona has discovered.  This is a close-up of...Read Full Story