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30 July 2010
NASA Braces Rover Fans for the Worst About Spirit
JPL issued a press release today with an update that mission controllers have still not heard from the hibernating Spirit rover. Even though the rover is experiencing one Mars' harshest winters since the rovers arrived, the rover team has begun an active "paging" technique called 'sweep and beep' in an effort to communicate with Spirit [...]
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29 July 2010
Opportunity Rover Captures Her First Dust Devil on Mars
The Opportunity rover has captured an image of a dust devil, and surprisingly, this is the first one ever that Oppy has spied. Spirit has seen dozens of dust devils over on the other side of the planet in Gusev Crater, and even the Phoenix lander's camera captured several of these whirling dust dervishes during [...]
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15 July 2010
Wind Gust Gives Opportunity Rover a Power Boost
Either some little Martians came by and gave the Opportunity rover a quick once-over cleaning, or a recent gust of wind blew layers of dust off her solar panels. The image above (supplied by our favorite photo- whiz Stu Atkinson), shows Oppy's solar panels on sol 2274 and 2299 (approximately June 18 and July 12 [...]
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29 June 2010
Opportunity Rover Able to See More Detail of Endeavour Crater
From a JPL press release: Mars rover team members have begun informally naming features around the rim of Endeavour Crater, as they develop plans to investigate that destination when NASA's Opportunity rover arrives there after many more months of driving. A new, super-resolution view of a portion of Endeavour's rim reveals details that were not [...]
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03 June 2010
Spirit Rover Still Providing New Evidence for Past Water on Mars
Even though the Mars Rover Spirit is asleep, a new look at old data from one of her instruments confirms the presence of large amounts of carbonate-rich rocks, which means that regions of the planet may have once harbored water. The Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer, or Mini-TES, instrument on the rover looked at an outcrop [...]
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12 May 2010
One Moment, Two Worlds
The New York Times Lens Blog came up with a great idea: They called it "A Moment in Time," and asked people everywhere to take a picture on May 2, 15:00 UTC and submit it, to share the variety and complexity of life on our world. Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society saw [...]
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06 February 2010
Movies of Spirit's Last Moves Before Winter
Even though the Spirit rover is stuck in a Martian sandtrap, the rover drivers were actually able to move her quite a bit, and therefore improving her chances of surviving the winter. This video shows recent drives by the Spirit rover from Jan. 14 to Feb. 4, 2010 (Sols 2145 to 2165), where the [...]
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07 January 2010
Opportunity's Vacation at Marquette Island
Caption: Opportunity leaves a mark on the Marquette Island rock on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL/U of AZ, colorization by Stuart Atkinson The Opportunity Mars rover has been sitting by a rock called Marquette Island since early November 2009. The stay has given the rover a bit of a respite from the "pedal to the metal" driving [...]
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01 December 2009
Mars Odyssey Goes into Safe Mode
The Mars Odyssey orbiter went into safe mode on Saturday, November 28th because of a glitch in the "memory error external bus" of the satellite. Odyssey will remain in safe mode at least until the end of the week, effectively slowing down communication with the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.(...)Read the rest of Mars Odyssey [...]
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07 November 2009
One Strange Mars Rock
Opportunity has come upon another big rock on Mars. But what is it? Another meteorite? A big clump of ejecta from an old impact? There's lots of other debris scattered around this area as well. The rock has been named "Marquette Island," staying with the island theme for the other meteorites Oppy [...]
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19 October 2009
MER Team Prepares to Extract Spirit
To prepare for an actual attempt to extract the Spirit rover from its sand-trapped predicament, engineers using test rovers on Earth have added a new challenge. Until last week, those commanding and assessing drives by the test rovers were usually in the same room as the sandbox setup simulating Spirit's predicament, where they can [...]
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09 October 2009
Here Be Dragons on Mars!
Oh no! Hopefully the same folks who went nuts over the Bigfoot on Mars don't see this one! Could there really be a dragon on Mars? Relax, its just a shadow from Opportunity's camera mast, distorted by the unusual and bumpy fusion crust surface of the Shelter Island meteorite that the Mars [...]
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02 October 2009
Opportunity Finds Another Big Meteorite
It's amazing what a rover can find laying by the side of the road. The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found a rock that apparently is another meteorite. Less than three weeks ago, Opportunity drove away from a larger meteorite called "Block Island" that the rover examined for six weeks. Now, this new [...]
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23 September 2009
Columbia Hills Flyover 2.0; Awesome Meridiani Mosaics
About 18 months ago Doug Ellison from UnmannedSpaceflight.com created a flyover of the Columbia Hills on Mars using data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Spirit, the Mars rover. He's now done a 2.0 version to mark Spirit's recent birthday — she's been on Mars for 3 Martian years. Ellison made the skies [...]
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26 August 2009
Mars Kicking Spirit When She's Down
The Spirit rover has been stuck in loose soil on Mars for several months now, and just as the rover team is preparing to execute maneuvers to attempt to free Spirit, a dust storm hits. Is Mars an unforgiving planet or what? The amount of electricity generated by the solar panels on Spirit [...]
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