Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

A set of Mars image data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a year ago was just released to Hubble's data archive. It was captured by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on January 30, 2008 when Mars was about 115 million kilometers from Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

In which I discover Earl Slipher's Mars: The Photographic Story.

Emily Lakdawalla

Next in The Planetary Society's 365 Days of Astronomy doubleheader is Planetary Society President Jim Bell, whose show, airing today, is on

Emily Lakdawalla

Spirit's been getting some nice views of the spot it spent all of 2008 in,

Ryan Anderson

NASA has put together a nice movie of Dr. Mike Mumma summarizing his discovery of methane on Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

Tonight at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena, Jim Bell and Bill Nye will be celebrating the 5th anniversary of the landing of the rovers; Jim will be showing lots of pretty 3D pictures.

Emily Lakdawalla

A tip of the hat to Ryan over at Martian Chronicles for posting this lovely version of the Santorini panorama, which Opportunity captured just before Mars dipped too close to the Sun in late November of last year.

Emily Lakdawalla

Hallelujah! For the first time in almost an Earth year, amateur mars mapper Eduardo Tesheiner is able to scratch a tiny little line on his map of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's peregrinations across Gusev Crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

Scott Maxwell is one of those many guys (and gals) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who rarely gets his name in the news but who is absolutely indispensable to the success of a space mission. I don't know what his official title is, but whatever it is, it's not as good as the colloquial name given to his position: Rover Driver.

Emily Lakdawalla

On January 3, 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit landed on Mars, and I was with the science team at JPL when it happened! I can't believe it's been five years since the successful landing.

Ryan Anderson

As I post this, NASA is holding a press conference in which they are announcing that the Mars Science Laboratory's launch date will be slipped by two years.

Ryan Anderson

Mike Griffin started the press conference, and got right down to business announcing the launch delay and indicating that the actuators as well as other technical problems are responsible.

Ryan Anderson

At 12 noon EST. I know what the announcement is, but I'm not allowed to tell you! How frustrating is that?!

Ryan Anderson

I just heard, via this article at Universe Today, that the sample cache on MSL has been canceled.

Emily Lakdawalla

The period of Mars solar conjunction has just begun, which means that a host of scientists and engineers whose day jobs entail interaction with the five active Mars spacecraft are getting a five-week break from the daily grind of operations.

Ryan Anderson

I've known about this for a little while but it was finally made public: The list of MSL landing sites had now been trimmed to four.

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a worrying update posted on the JPL website for Spirit today: an early-season dust storm has darkened its skies enough that its solar panels produced only 89 watt-hours of power yesterday, sol 1,725. Neither rover has ever, ever seen power production levels that low, not even during last year's massive dust storm.

Emily Lakdawalla

Another day, another drive: on sols 1,693 and 1,695 the Opportunity rover conducted two more lengthy drives to the south, totaling almost 200 meters. On the other side of the planet, Spirit is FINALLY in motion again.

Emily Lakdawalla

Victoria crater, the site of a Mars year's worth of study, is now far over the horizon, as Opportunity has lately completed a series of very long drives. Opportunity is once again sailing the sand seas of Meridiani Planum.

Emily Lakdawalla

An article in the September 26 issue of Science neatly explains why only the southern half of Mars is strongly magnetized.