A wikizine following breaking news and images from the Mars Rover mission. The Rover has lasted much longer than anyone anticipated with minimal energy reserves. Get the latest from NASA and contribute stories.
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... 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... 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... 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
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... Read Full Story
