Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE team's latest flood of archived images, 1,025 of them. I skipped forward to page 42 (what other number would I pick?) and started browsing from there.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday the Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a press release announcing the first eight image releases that resulted from HiWish suggestions.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a little update here to post a Navcam panorama from Opportunity showing that the rover successfully arrived yesterday at the doublet crater she's been aiming for since she left Concepcion a couple of weeks ago.

Emily Lakdawalla

I saw this image at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference so am happy they released it: a view of Opportunity sitting on the north rim of the little, fresh Concepción crater, taken on sol 2153 (February 13, 2010).

Emily Lakdawalla

Well, it's already mid-day on the Friday a week after the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference ended and I'm STILL not done writing up my notes.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is one of the things that came out during LPSC last week and all I could do at the time was Tweet it—so here it is in blog form: the most unbelievably spectacular 3D animation of a bit of Mars I've seen yet, produced by Adrian Lark.

Emily Lakdawalla

I wrote earlier about some results from Spirit reported at this year's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas; here are the rest of my notes on rover-related talks, from Opportunity's site on the opposite side of Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yes, I'm totally not kidding, that is the headline in the Sun:

Emily Lakdawalla

Where to begin with the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC)?

Emily Lakdawalla

I think a goodly proportion of you readers have already figured this out for yourselves since it was launched last March, but I didn't download and install it until last weekend, so this is new to me: Google Mars is awesome.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a neat picture from Opportunity, a panorama composed of its wide-angle, mast-mounted Navcam cameras, showing the crater Concepcion.

Emily Lakdawalla

Although I am not suffering under the

Emily Lakdawalla

Doug Ellison has been playing with Martian digital terrain models recently, to great effect.

Emily Lakdawalla

For the first time ever, Mars Express' Visual Monitoring Camera has imaged the shadow of Mars' moon Phobos crossing the surface of Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

It looks like the rover team thinks Concepcion is pretty enough (in both aesthetic and a scientific senses) to be worthy of the full-color Pancam panorama treatment; color frames started arriving on Earth over the weekend.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since leaving Marquette Island on sol 2,122, Opportunity has been barreling southward on her journey toward Endeavour crater. On her horizon for the last several sols has been a very small but very fresh looking crater named Concepción.

Ryan Anderson

Check out these awesome flyovers of Mars, generated by Doug Ellison of UnmannedSpaceflight!

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a press briefing today that announced the official end of efforts to extricate Spirit from her sand trap at Troy. Instead, the rover drivers will now focus on improving the chances that Spirit will survive the coming winter so that she can carry on doing science once the power situation improves in the spring.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's a press briefing going on right now that marks today, January 26, 2010, more than six years after she landed, the day that NASA decided that Spirit's roving days were over.

Tanya Harrison