Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Opportunity is on a kilometers-long eastward road trip across Meridiani Planum toward the rim of a large ancient crater named Endeavour; it'll be many months yet before she gets there.

Emily Lakdawalla

Time to open the eleventh door in the advent calendar. Until the New Year, I'll be opening a door onto a different landscape from somewhere in the solar system. Where in the solar system are these sinuous ridges?

Emily Lakdawalla

Time to open the fourth door in the advent calendar. Where in the solar system is this crater-specked mound?

Emily Lakdawalla

To celebrate Mars Express' recent mission extension to 2014, here are some cool pictures that it took of Mars' inner and larger moon Phobos.

Emily Lakdawalla

JPL has just released some test images from the camera that has just been installed on the end of the Curiosity rover's robotic arm.

Emily Lakdawalla

In the last few days, Opportunity's passed by several craters, and the rover drivers took advantage of the chance encounters for what they call

Emily Lakdawalla

Adrian Lark has posted several new flights over gorgeous Martian landscapes to his Youtube channel. My favorite of his recent ones is this dive into Zumba crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a linky post here.

Emily Lakdawalla

Waaaay back when Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004, the Planetary Society helped the public participate in the missions with a number of projects, including one where we printed

Ryan Anderson

We wrapped up the landing site workshop on Wednesday afternoon by revisiting each of the four sites and discussing them in turn. Unfortunately, the way that we did this was very disappointing, and made for a frustrating afternoon.

Ryan Anderson

With the details of all four landing sites on the table, we started day 3 of the meeting by hearing from the engineers and several scientists about the properties of the ellipses, the risks for landing and the capabilities of the landing system.

Emily Lakdawalla

I left the first day of the Fourth Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Community Workshop on Monday just as they were getting in to the site-specific presentations. I left with no concern that I'd miss anything, though, because I knew that once he got done presenting his own work on Gale Crater, Cornell grad student Ryan Anderson would be taking notes and blogging the presentations on the other three sites.

David Kass

Two weeks ago Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) started a four-week campaign to support entry, descent, and landing phase for the next Mars rover, Mars Science Laboratory (or

Ryan Anderson

Today was jam-packed with interesting stuff about Mawrth, Holden, and Eberswalde! I took tons of notes, and I will try to use those to assemble a coherent picture of what was presented and discussed today.

Ryan Anderson

The second site that we discussed yesterday was Holden Crater, a 155 kilometer crater that formed right in the middle of a huge drainage system.

Ryan Anderson

The final site of the four that we discussed yesterday was Eberswalde, which of course is interesting because of the big delta that is preserved in the western part of the crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

I apologize in advance for the expanse of text, but I hope that some of you will find the details interesting.

Ryan Anderson

Today was the first of a three day workshop in which the Mars science community gathers together and hashes out what we know and what we don't know about the four finalist MSL landing sites.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, about 200 scientists and engineers will sit in an over-air-conditioned room in Monrovia, California to participate in what is officially titled the

Ryan Anderson

Well folks, I'm off to Pasadena to help the Mars community decide where to send its next rover.