NASA has formed an internal review board to study possible reasons for the apparent failure of the Mars Global Surveyor and to look for ways to increase the safety of other spacecraft. Given that the MGS operated more than four times longer than the original planned mission, I would venture a guess they did something right in building it!
Continue reading "Internal Review on MGS"
A new release on the MSSS page gives some details about NASA's Mars announcement. Signs of both recent (as in over the course of the mission) cratering and gully activity (caused by liquid water?) on the surface of the red planet.
Continue reading "An Active Planet"
Still no contact with the Mars Global Surveyor. Opportunity, operating on the martian surface, failed to hear anything during the latest communications attempt.
It is looking more likely that the Mars Global Surveyor has reached mission end. Still...over 240,000 images, shots of the MER's and other vehicles, in orbit around Mars since September 11, 1997. That is one heck of a productive mission!
As reported by one of our readers, the MGS, operating in space for ten years now, has suffered a communications problem. NASA may try to use the recently arrived MRO to snap a picture of the other orbiter, to see if any problems can be spotted with alignment, solar arrays and the like.
Six years of data from the Mars Global Surveyor have been analyzed to show the presence of hundreds of auroras in the night skies of Mars. The process that creates them isn't quite the same as that on Earth, and they probably aren't as strong. However:
"The fact that we see auroras as often as we do is amazing," said UC Berkeley physicist David A. Brain, the lead author of a paper on the discovery recently accepted by the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The discovery of auroras on Mars teaches us something about how and why they happen elsewhere in the solar system, including on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune."
A look back at the way the landing site for Opportunity's landing site in Meridiani Planum was chosen.
The Mars Journal, a peer-reviewed online scholarly journal has come out with its first two papers.
Mars has undergone a remarkable evolution since the first probe from Earth went sailing past the planet, sending back a few shots. Given what we saw, Mars was declared a dead planet, somewhat like our Moon, not really worthy of our attention.
Continue reading "The Changing Face of Mars"
Following up on yesterday's announcement, here are two stories about the changing face of Mars.