NASA's Phoenix lander has discovered a toxic chemical in soil near Mars' north pole, dimming hopes for finding life on the Red Planet, the probe's operators said Monday.
The Phoenix lander got its robotic arm onto a sample of water ice from Mars' surface and popped the ice into tiny, onboard "ovens" that will help determine if the water could support life, NASA researchers said Thursday.
The Phoenix spacecraft has tasted Martian water for the first time. The robot heated up ice in one of its instruments earlier this week. Scientists say the chemical test confirms the presence of ice near the Martian north pole
The fun won't be over for the University of Arizona when batteries for the school-led Phoenix Mars Lander fail and its computers freeze up in the Martian arctic after its three-month mission ends.
If Dr. Robert Zubrin could take a trip to Mars, he would be sure to pack a bread maker in his suitcase. Not just because bread is a pretty reliable expeditionary food, but because the act of cooking, according to Zubrin, seems to help people get along with each other, especially when they are in slightly dire, less than luxurious and more than stressful circumstances.
(TUCSON, Ariz.) -- Scientists for the Phoenix Mars Lander are wrestling with an intermittent short circuit on the spacecraft.
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet's surface on the first day of its three-month mission "to taste and sniff the northern polar site's soil and ice," the space agency said.
NASA's latest mission will analyze the Red Planet's permafrost for signs of past and present life
The first pictures from NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which successfully touched down near Mars' north pole Sunday, showed a pattern of brown polygons as far as the camera could see.
In the wake of the wildly successful Spirit and Opportunity rover missions, you would think NASA would approach the landing of the next Martian probe with high confidence.
NASA's Phoenix lander has discovered a toxic chemical in soil near Mars' north pole, dimming hopes for finding life on the Red Planet, the probe's operators said Monday.
The Phoenix lander got its robotic arm onto a sample of water ice from Mars' surface and popped the ice into tiny, onboard "ovens" that will help determine if the water could support life, NASA researchers said Thursday.
The Phoenix spacecraft has tasted Martian water for the first time. The robot heated up ice in one of its instruments earlier this week. Scientists say the chemical test confirms the presence of ice near the Martian north pole
The fun won't be over for the University of Arizona when batteries for the school-led Phoenix Mars Lander fail and its computers freeze up in the Martian arctic after its three-month mission ends.
If Dr. Robert Zubrin could take a trip to Mars, he would be sure to pack a bread maker in his suitcase. Not just because bread is a pretty reliable expeditionary food, but because the act of cooking, according to Zubrin, seems to help people get along with each other, especially when they are in slightly dire, less than luxurious and more than stressful circumstances.
(TUCSON, Ariz.) -- Scientists for the Phoenix Mars Lander are wrestling with an intermittent short circuit on the spacecraft.
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet's surface on the first day of its three-month mission "to taste and sniff the northern polar site's soil and ice," the space agency said.
NASA's latest mission will analyze the Red Planet's permafrost for signs of past and present life
The first pictures from NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which successfully touched down near Mars' north pole Sunday, showed a pattern of brown polygons as far as the camera could see.
In the wake of the wildly successful Spirit and Opportunity rover missions, you would think NASA would approach the landing of the next Martian probe with high confidence.
NASA's Phoenix lander is set to touch down in the Martian Arctic on Sunday, where it will start chewing through the permafrost in search of life
Like a miner prospecting for gold, NASA hopes its latest robot to Mars hits pay dirt when it lands Sunday near the red planet's north pole to conduct a 90-day digging mission
NASA sent conflicting signals Monday evening about what an official told CNN is a planned $4 million budget cut in NASA's Mars Exploration Rover program.
The following profiles feature prominent women in the fields of politics, law, sports, science and business.
Astronomers are hoping for a spectacular high-impact collision as asteroid 2007 WD5 zooms toward Mars
Can everyone be an astronomer? It certainly seems that way, especially with some of the latest tools at our fingertips, like Google Sky, which allows Internet users to navigate through a digitized map of space. But some say virtual astronomy is not just for amateurs and should also be the way forward for professional space exploration. A future of virtual astronauts, too.
The soil on Mars may contain microbial life, according to a new interpretation of data first collected more than 30 years ago.
As the New Year begins, a numerical look at what's in store in 2007.
When, after an eight-month voyage, NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft beamed back the first images of Mars in 1965 -- to score a victory over Russia's Mars 1 in the Cold War space-race -- it changed the way scientists thought about the Red Planet.
Long before David Bowie crooned, "Is there life on Mars?" scientists have wondered the same - are we alone in our solar system? Now striking pictures suggesting the presence of liquid water on the Martian surface have scientists believing we are getting closer to finding out.
Spectacular new images of Mars could reveal clues about tens of millions of years of the red planet's history.
Nearly three years after landing on Mars, the rover "Opportunity" has reached a region of the planet that may provide the best clues yet about the history of the red planet.
No space programs have captured the public imagination quite like NASA's exploration of the moon in the early 1970s. Now, earth's satellite is in national space agencies' sights again.
NASA started it all back in 1976 with an image of an interesting mountain on Mars and a caption that described it as appearing to have eyes and nostrils.
Those long-lived NASA Mars rovers -- Spirit and Opportunity -- remain in fairly good shape, with one robot in survival mode as Martian winter arrives while its twin snakes its way across a taxing terrain of sand dunes to reach a striking target.
Martian gullies that some scientists believe were recently carved by liquid water might instead be the result of landslides triggered by wind and meteor impacts, scientists say.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, on a two-year mission to study the Martian atmosphere and surface, and search for water, pulled off a dangerous and tricky maneuver known as "orbit insertion" and began circling the red planet Friday.
Attention, people of Earth: We are going to Mars. This is no sci-fi fantasy; for the past two years, NASA has been gearing up to meet the Bush administration's goal of landing humans on Mars by around 2030. The agency plans to set up a base on the Moon by 2020 to act as a staging area; that effort alone is projected to cost at least $104 billion. Throw in the round-trip voyage to Mars, and John Edwards, space systems analyst at Forecast International, estimates that the total cost of the program will top $400 billion--making it history's largest government-backed science project.
NASA's latest mission to Mars could eclipse all previous ones if it can get into orbit on Friday.
Attention, people of Earth: We are going to Mars. This is no sci-fi fantasy; for the past two years, NASA has been gearing up to meet the Bush administration's goal of landing humans on Mars by aro...
The following profiles feature prominent women in the fields of politics, law, sports, science and business.
Make way rovers Spirit and Opportunity -- the next wheels on Mars will belong to the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) -- a huge step in how that planet is further poked, probed, and more fully plumbed for new information.
A pair of newly released studies have challenged the theory that a salty sea once lapped the shores of Mars' Meridiani Planum.
By the time Spirit and Opportunity made Time's "What's Next" list in 2003, the pair were already millions of miles into their journey to Mars. Earth's grounded citizens already had been dazzled by the journey of Sojourner, a much smaller rover that ventured to Mars in 1997. But Sojourner was a test run for its larger siblings. Spirit and Opportunity were well equipped to bring back a plethora of scientific information about the planet that once inspired popular visions of little green people.
The Mars Spirit rover has reached a milestone moment in its exploration of the Red Planet.
NASA's Mars rover Spirit has caught a bevy of dust devils racing across the surface of Mars, which researchers compiled into a stunning new movie.
More research is needed to determine whether potentially dangerous life forms exist on Mars before a manned mission to the Earth's nearest planetary neighbor can go ahead, a NASA advisory panel has warned.
At the beginning of 2001, with Mars Express (MEx) and Beagle 2 progressing well towards what everyone thought would be an epic journey to Mars, the European Space Agency (ESA) called together a group of 10 Experts in Space Exploration.
New images of Mars show fresh detail of steep and inexplicable slopes.
Mars scientists and engineers are elated about a dust-busting blast that has struck the Spirit rover at its Gusev crater exploration site.
When it comes to long life, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity takes after its robotic twin Spirit.
Sitting on the hill of an alien world millions of miles from home, a hardy NASA robot celebrates an anniversary Monday -- one year on the planet Mars.
The Opportunity Mars rover has turned into a junkyard dog, prowling ever closer to a hunk of space litter at Meridiani Planum -- a discarded heat shield.
Scientists have proposed a scheme to introduce a series of planetary parks on Mars that would see areas of the Red Planet transformed into conservation zones.
Researchers can now say definitively that Mars once supported a watery environment, but whether the Red Planet could have ever supported life is still far from certain.
Russian space researchers will lock six men in a metal tube for more than a year in an effort to mimic the stresses and challenges of a manned mission to Mars.
My life changed dramatically on August 6, 1996, when a group of NASA scientists claimed to have found a fossil in a meteorite from Mars.
Starting Wednesday, the Mars rovers will go into an anticipated 12-day "loss of communication" period as the sun passes between the Earth and Mars, an alignment known as conjunction.
NASA's robot space explorers are getting smarter, due in no small part to the human-written software that powers their electronic minds.
Most skiers are familiar with the slope of an expert, or black diamond, trail -- about 30 degrees, on average.
NASA decided to roll the dice on Mars this Tuesday by dispatching its rover Opportunity into a crater from which it may never escape.
Two interplanetary Energizer bunnies, NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers, keep going and going. The pair of robotic explorers are now well into their extended missions on the surface of Mars.
NASA's latest experiment with health care may benefit Earth-bound patients as much as astronauts -- and space researchers couldn't be happier.
The Mars rover Opportunity is perched above a crater that researchers said could open up a window into the mysterious -- and possibly wet -- history of the Red Planet.
Whirling dust devils on Mars probably generate high-voltage electric fields and associated magnetic fields that would need to be considered by future human explorers, scientists said Tuesday.
The manager of NASA's Mars missions said Thursday they have extended the working lives of Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity until September and they could be extended even further.
A trio of research teams independently probing the martian atmosphere for signs of methane have confirmed the presence of the gas and raised a host of explanations for how it got there.
Scientists have learned the composition of the mysterious sphere-shaped objects scattered across the crater floor at Meridiani Planum, the landing site of the Opportunity Mars rover.
Astronomer Philip Plait is tired of radio personality Richard Hoagland's claims.
Those on-the-prowl Mars robots -- Spirit and Opportunity -- are sending back extraordinary images and science data about the Red Planet and its history of climate and water.
Now that NASA's Opportunity rover has established a locale on Mars where rocks were once drenched in water, it is in a race against time and battery life to learn how widespread and deep the water was.
Mission accomplished: NASA scientists say the Mars rovers have found what they were looking for -- hard evidence that the red planet was once "soaking wet."
[HIT] Out with the drab.
The Mars rover Opportunity has moved to the lip of the crater in which it landed and peeked out over the rim, mission scientists say.
People think that driving a rover is like driving a car, but it's not. Since Mars is more than 100 million miles away, even at the speed of light the radio signals coming from those football-field-...
The Mars rover Opportunity rolled off its lander early Saturday, beginning the next phase of its mission to study the rocks and soil of the Martian surface for signs of water.
Eighteen years ago Wednesday the Challenger shuttle exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven crew members, and NASA announced it was designating the Mars rover Opportunity's landing site Challenger Memorial Station in honor of the astronauts.
The Mars rover Opportunity is sending fresh data, including new photographs taken on the vehicle's parachute trip to the planet's surface, to mission control.
Attempting to diagnose a nearly mute and temporarily delirious spacecraft more than 100 million miles away, NASA mission controllers said Friday that they suspect a hardware problem on the six-wheeled Mars rover may have caused a severe malfunction.
The European orbiter Mars Express detected ice at the Red Planet's south pole, mission officials at Darmstadt, Germany, said Friday.
The Spirit rover has stopped transmitting data from Mars, NASA mission controllers said Thursday, but there were signs it is still operating at a basic level.
The Mars Spirit rover turned a camera back toward the lander that carried it safely to the Martian ground 18 days ago and snapped pictures that were released Wednesday by Jet Propulsion Lab engineers in Pasadena, California.
Mission to Mars: Bush's vision
The Mars rover Spirit stretched its robotic arm over Martian soil Friday, and its microscopic imager is capturing even-higher-resolution images than the ones sent back after landing.
A NASA robot rumbled from its lander onto the surface of Mars on Thursday, a crucial first step in a mission to investigate alien rocks and soil for evidence of water and perhaps life.
Support and skepticism have greeted U.S. President George W. Bush's bold plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020, and eventually to Mars.
Mission managers are preparing to roll the Mars rover Spirit off its lander early Thursday, positioning it for departure down a rear ramp.
Saying "the desire to explore and understand is part of our character," President Bush Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and use the mission as a steppingstone for future manned trips to Mars and beyond.
Mission managers are making final preparations to roll the Mars rover Spirit off its lander later this week, among them cutting the last cable tying it down.
The former President Bush mockingly spoke of "the vision thing," that Americans expect big ideas from their leaders. President George W. Bush may soon deliver.
Further attempts are being made to contact the Beagle 2 Mars probe, which has been missing since Christmas Day.
NASA debuted a color picture from the Spirit rover on Tuesday showing gray rocks peppering a Martian lake bed awash in its natural hues of red, pink and orange.
On its first full day on Mars, a NASA craft beamed back a three-dimensional panorama of its new home, a tantalizing hint of the capacity of the most sophisticated eyes ever to scan the red planet surface.
NASA's remote controlled rover Spirit is safely sitting on the surface of planet Mars sending images to Earth, where excited scientists will examine data for signs of water and life.
The robotic explorer Spirit woke up to its first full day on Mars on Sunday, hours after making a perilous landing, sending postcards to Earth and taking a much deserved snooze.
A NASA robotic explorer touched down on the red planet Saturday night, sending a signal home that it survived the risky descent through the Martian atmosphere and bouncing landing.
On the 20th anniversary of the first landing of men on the moon, President Bush ordered NASA to take the next logical steps in space exploration: establishing bases on the moon and sending a manned...
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