Tag: Mars
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ExoMars orbiter fine-tunes path toward red planet
Artist’s concept of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. Credit: Thales Alenia Space. A European spacecraft cruising toward Mars fired its main engine Thursday, tweaking its trajectory and helping set up for carefully-choreographed simultaneous maneuvers Oct. 19 to place part of the tandem mission into orbit around the red planet and deposit a stationary battery-powered lander…
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NASA developing plans for commercially-built Mars orbiter
An artist’s illustration of one potential design for NASA’s new Mars orbiter, which could launch as soon as 2022. Credit: NASA NASA is advancing a plan to send a robotic orbiter to Mars in the early 2020s, developing designs with five U.S. satellite makers for a mission to extend high-resolution mapping capabilities, telecommunications relay functions,…
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NASA books nuclear-certified Atlas 5 rocket for Mars 2020 rover launch
An Atlas 5-541 rocket, like this one, will launch the Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Pat Corkery/United Launch Alliance CAPE CANAVERAL — America’s next Mars rover, a $2.1 billion nuclear-powered vehicle to search for evidence that life once existed there, will be launched to the Red Planet in the summer of 2020 by a powerful Atlas…
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40 years since Viking, scientists still on the hunt for life on Mars
NASA’s Viking 1 lander captured this image of its landing site at Chryse Planitia at sunset in August 1976. Credit: NASA/JPL Four decades after NASA’s Viking landers acquired humanity’s first view of the surface of Mars, a planet whose reality lived in the imaginations of skywatchers for millennia, a definitive smoking gun for microbial life…
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July 20, 1976: Landing on the red planet
Today marks the 40th anniversary — July 20, 1976 — of the first U.S. robotic landing on another planet by the Viking 1 spacecraft on Mars.
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NASA seeks five concepts for 2022 Mars orbiter and gives go-ahead for 2020 rover
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter relaying data. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech) NASA says it’s selected five aerospace companies, including Boeing, to conduct concept studies for a Mars telecommunications orbiter that’s likely to launch in 2022. It’s also given the formal go-ahead for the final design of its long-planned 2020 Mars rover. In…
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Scientists explain how a giant impact created Mars’ past and present moons
An artist’s conception shows the collision of Mars with another celestial object. The scenario could have given rise to a debris disk, and eventually to Mars’ two present-day moons. (Copyright 2016 Labex UnivEarthS) Are Mars’ two moons asteroids that were captured by the Red Planet’s gravitational field, or are they the result of an ancient…
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NASA-funded UW researchers develop kidney-stone zapping technology
Michael Bailey, the principal investigator of the research team, with the ultrasound system that will be sent to the International Space Station. Bailey’s team is incorporating technology that breaks up kidney stones into the machine. (Photo from HSNewsBeat) Imagine you are an astronaut, chosen for the first manned mission to Mars. After years of preparation,…
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Weird sand ripples on Mars tell tales about Red Planet’s past and present climate
Two sizes of ripples can be seen in this view of a Martian sand dune. The larger ripples are roughly 10 feet apart, and unlike any type seen in earthly sand fields. The smaller ripples, superimposed on the larger ripples, are similar to those seen on Earth. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS) The sands…
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Oxygen finding strengthens case that Mars was once habitable
This scene shows NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at a location called “Windjana,” where the rover found rocks containing manganese-oxide minerals, which require abundant water and strongly oxidizing conditions to form. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS High concentrations of manganese oxides found in Martian rocks by NASA’s Curiosity rover indicate the red planet’s atmosphere once had much more oxygen…