Mars Rover Magazine

The Mars rover Spirit is slowly being moved by the NASA team to a new location on Mars, where it will have the best chance of surviving its third Martian winter since its original landing on Mars for both Spirit and Opportunity’s projected ninety-day mission in January of 2004. Now Spirit is celebrating its 4th anniversary on Mars. The discovery of silica-rich deposits uncovered in May was reported by Cornell’s Steve Squyres and colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in early December in San Francisco. Squyers, principal investigator for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission, calls it “one of the most ... Read Full Story

“These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track … threatening asteroids,” said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We’re used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million. Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs.”   On January 30, 2008, there will be a one in 75 chance of a newly discovered asteroid, the Asteroid 2007 WD5, impacting Mars in the area where the twin rover Opportunity has been exploring since 2004. Currently located between Earth and Mars, was formerly given the odds of ... Read Full Story

Scientists at NASA are preparing to have the Opportunity Rover climb 40 feet down to a band of rocks in the Victoria Crater on Mars. First of all, it is amazing that the Opportunity is still functioning properly after so much time. No one expected Opportunity to remain in operation for this many months. It has survived a few serious dust storms, and it just keeps on cruising around and transmitting data. Awesome. Scientists believe that the target rocks represent the ancient surface of Mars and hope that studying them could shed clues on the planet's early climate. On Tuesday morning, engineers sent commands ... Read Full Story

Wandering Spirit The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted fellow Martian explorer, the Mars Exploration Rover "Spirit," inside the feature dubbed "Home Plate" in Gusev Crater.   The intrepid, long-lived rover shows up as a tiny black speck at about the 5:30 position of the lighter-colored, roughly circular central feature of this image, taken on Sept. 27, 2007.   Spirit is driving toward what is hoped will be a safe winter home on the north-facing slopes on the north side of Home Plate, toward the top of the image. There it will tilt its solar panels toward ... Read Full Story

EUROPA NEWSWIRE. Photo by: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University . PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity is investigating a metallic meteorite the size of a large watermelon that is providing researchers more details about the Red Planet's environmental history. The rock, dubbed "Block Island," is larger than any other known meteorite on Mars. Scientists calculate it is too massive to have hit the ground without disintegrating unless Mars had a much thicker atmosphere than it has now when the rock fell. An atmosphere slows the descent of meteorites. Additional studies also may provide clues about how weathering has affected the rock since it fell. Two weeks ... Read Full Story