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... 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... 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... 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... Read Full Story

Well, Old Man winter is blowing his icy gusts of cold over the United States while NASA is preparing new software in order to help the twin rovers find protection during the worst time of the year on planet Mars. The software will hopefully also be able to combine this designated spot with their new spring explorations. So far, the new software has decided that the steep Martian mesa “Von Braun” is a perfect choice, at least according to NASA’s software and data analysis determination. But... Read Full Story

With a third harsh winter slowly approaching the planet Mars since the arrival of the twin rover Spirit and its companion Opportunity, NASA team leaders have been slowly driving the little robot Spirit to a safe spot for its ultimate survival. This safe spot is considered to be one that will offer the least winter damage to the rover, in order for it to celebrate its fourth Martian anniversary since its arrival on Mars in January 2004 with its twin rover, Opportunity. Slowly pulling itself... 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... Read Full Story

One minute it was there, the next it wasn't.  What happened?  Well, NASA scientists think that those mysterious dice-size crumbs of bright material might have been ice.  And ice melts. NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander took some photos five days ago of bright unidentified clumps.  When they went back to take another look, the clumps were gone.  Scientists think that the material might have been frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it to the surface. "It must be ice," said Phoenix... Read Full Story

It sounds like some sort of horror story 8-year olds would make up to justify not eating their vegetables, doesn’t it? But this isn’t coming from the limitless imagination of a 2nd grader. It’s coming from rocket scientists from NASA… or at least one of their Chemists working on the Phoenix project that’s sampling soil on the Martian surface. “It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well... Read Full Story

Thats the big question in the mars community right now.  Spirit is covered in dust and gets very little solar energy from it's panels each day.  At this point it takes an entire day of charging batteries just to crawl for 1 hour.  The Spirit team is trying to get the rover to a sun-facing slope in time for the Martian winter.  If it doesn't make it to the sunshine before winter, the rover will likely not survive the long winter months. It's amazing that the Spirit has survived for as long as... Read Full Story