About time that NASA does something.
I'm surprised they are using an American rocket and not going to the Russians or even the Chinese for the launch.
The State Column
NASA officials spent much of the weekend putting the last-minute touches on a rover headed to Mars this week.
NASA will launch the rover — nicknamed Curiosity — using an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on November 26, space agency officials said. The launch was originally scheduled to blast off on November 25, however, officials said Sunday that the launch will be delayed in order to replace a suspect battery on the rover’s rocket...
The rover will travel to Mars, where it will land in Gale crater, which is thought to be about three and a half billion years old and more than 95 miles in diameter. The crater has a combined size of Connecticut and Rhode Island with a three-mile-high mountain of layered sedimentary rock at its bottom — an enticing area of exploration for scientists.
Monday, November 21, 2011
NASA set to launch Mars rover searching for signs of water, life
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Tributes to Terrorism Victims are on Mars
Way cool.
NASA JPL
In September 2001, Honeybee Robotics employees in lower Manhattan were building a pair of tools for grinding weathered rinds off rocks on Mars, so that scientific instruments on NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity could inspect the rocks' interiors.
That month's attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, less than a mile away, shook the lives of the employees and millions of others.
Work on the rock abrasion tools needed to meet a tight schedule to allow thorough testing before launch dates governed by the motions of the planets. The people building the tools could not spend much time helping at shelters or in other ways to cope with the life-changing tragedy of Sept. 11. However, they did find a special way to pay tribute to the thousands of victims who perished in the attack.
An aluminum cuff serving as a cable shield on each of the rock abrasion tools on Mars was made from aluminum recovered from the destroyed World Trade Center towers. The metal bears the image of an American flag and fills a renewed purpose as part of solar system exploration.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Salty water may flow on Mars
Water on Mars? Why not, their is water here and water in space.
Water = Life.
The Los Angeles Times
Salty water may flow on Mars in the form of strange, dark lines on the terrain that grow and fade with the seasons, according to recent images. The findings, reported in the journal Science, provide a new line of evidence that life could exist on the Red Planet.
The findings, released Thursday, describe images taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, currently circling the planet. The otherwise unremarkable lines on the planet's slopes grow more prominent during the warm season, proliferating from late Martian spring into early fall. This suggests they were made by volatile chemicals that can boil at relatively low temperatures, such as water and carbon dioxide, the authors wrote.
They look rather like flow lines that would be left by running water, ending in light-colored patches that could be material deposited by the flow, the authors added.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Advertise on NYTimes.com NASA Picks Rover Destination: Mountain on Mars
At least we will have this, at least for now.
NASA would like to continue with space exploration, aside from this they have also announced plans to put Astronauts on a Asteroid.
Funding, of course, stands to be cut from the NASA Budget leaving us with nothing to pay attention to in space. 
The New York Times
NASA’s next Mars rover — the ambitious, beleaguered, delayed Mars Science Laboratory finally has a destination.
Mission scientists announced Friday that the rover, a nuclear-powered vehicle the size of a small S.U.V., would head to Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide depression near the Martian equator. What attracted them there is a mountain that rises upward nearly three miles at the center, making it taller, for example, than Mount Rainier outside Seattle.
“The thing about this mountain is it’s not a tall spire,” John P. Grotzinger, the project scientist, said at a news conference at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. “It’s a broad, low, moundlike shape. What it means is we can drive up it with a rover. So this might be the tallest mountain anywhere in the solar system that we could actually climb with a rover.”
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Huge seas 'once existed on Mars'
More evidence that life is everywhere in the Universe .
BBC
US scientists have found further evidence that huge seas existed long ago on Mars.
A geological mapping project found sedimentary deposits in a region called Hellas Planitia which suggest a large sea once stood there.
The 2,000 km-wide, 8km-deep Hellas basin is a giant impact crater - the largest such structure on Mars.
The researchers say their data support a lake between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago.
Some scientists believe that conditions on Mars were more favourable for the evolution of life at this time than they were on Earth.
"This mapping makes geologic interpretations consistent with previous studies, and constrains the timing of these putative lakes to the early-middle Noachian period on Mars," said Dr Leslie Bleamaster, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson.
The researchers say that fine-layered outcrops around the eastern rim of Hellas are likely to be sedimentary deposits.
They were formed through the erosion and transport of rock and soil from the Martian highlands into a standing body of water.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
NASA: Building blocks of life found on Mars
NASA scientists last night unveiled compelling evidence of life on Mars.
A special mission to the Red Planet has revealed the likely presence of a form of pond scum - the building blocks of life as we know it.
Monday, March 8, 2010
New Rocket Engine Could Reach Mars in 40 Days
Amazing technology to power future space exploration .
Many think that going to mars is futile , and it possibly is , but we are Explorers , and what better way to explore !
Space.com
Future Mars outposts or colonies may seem more distant than ever with NASA's exploration plans in flux, but the rocket technology that could someday propel a human mission to the red planet in as little as 40 days may already exist.
A company founded by former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz has been developing a new rocket engine that draws upon electric power and magnetic fields to channel superheated plasma out the back. That stream of plasma generates steady, efficient thrust that uses low amounts of propellant and builds up speed over time.
"People have known for a long time, even back in the '50s, that electric propulsion would be needed for serious exploration of Mars," said Tim Glover, director of development at the Ad Astra Rocket Company.
The rocket technology could drastically cut down the amount of time a spacecraft needs to send astronauts on Mars missions. Instead of half a year, a spacecraft could make the trip in just over a month using the engine and a large enough power source, according to an Ad Astra mission study.
NASA's recent course change has freed up some funding for new propulsion technologies. And the U.S. space agency has not lost sight of the red planet, NASA administrator Charles Bolden told Congress as he presented a new budget last month.
"While we cannot provide a date certain for the first human visit, with Mars as a key long-term destination we can identify missing capabilities needed for such a mission and use this to help define many of the goals for our emerging technology development," Bolden said.
Familiar chemical rockets that burn solid or liquid chemical propellants won't get humans to Mars fast because they would require too much propellant. They can create a huge boost for several minutes at the cost of huge inefficiency — not unlike a speed demon with poor gas mileage.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Trees on Mars?
The "trees" are really trails of debris caused by landslides as ice melts in Mars's spring.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
NASA: Orbiter spots ice in Martian meteor craters
Not that we can do anything about it With The Obama Administration , de-funding everything That has to do with Space research !
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Computerworld - A NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has spotted exposed ice in five different spots on the Red Planet.
After years of speculation and last year's intensive hunt for water and other elements that could support life, NASA scientists reported today that they've found frozen water just a few feet below the planet's surface.
"This ice is a relic of a more humid climate from perhaps just several thousand years ago," said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, Tucson, during a press conference today.
NASA scientists said they found the exposed ice inside craters, caused by meteors slamming into the Red Planet last year. Scientific instruments onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found that the icy craters range from 1 1/2 to 8 feet deep.
The exposed ice first appeared as bright patches and then darkened in a matter of weeks as the ice vaporized in the Martian atmosphere.
"Craters tell us a lot about the object on which they occur," said Ken Edgett, a senior staff scientist at Malin Space Science Systems. "They're great probes of what lies beneath the surface."
Friday, June 19, 2009
First hard evidence found of a lake on Mars
Where there is Water , there is Life !
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A long, deep canyon and the remains of beaches are perhaps the clearest evidence yet of a standing lake on the surface of Mars -- one that apparently contained water when the planet was supposed to have already dried up, scientists said on Wednesday.
Images from a camera called the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate water carved a 30-mile-(50-km-)long canyon, a team at the University of Colorado at Boulder reported.
It would have covered 80 square miles (200 sq km) and been up to 1,500 feet deep, the researchers wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
There is now no dispute that water exists on the surface or Mars -- robot explorers have found ice. There is also evidence that water may still seep to the surface from underground, although it quickly disappears in the cold, thin atmosphere of the red planet.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Plumes of methane gas found on Mars
"Mars is active," said Michael Meyer, head of NASA's Mars program. "Whether it's geology or biology, we don't yet know."
Active ? Very nice ! One day we will go to Mars , When though ? Who Knows ?
The L.A. Times
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Scientists have discovered large plumes of methane gas in the Martian atmosphere, a key marker for biological processes on Earth but not convincing proof that rudimentary life-forms exist on Mars.
Scientists led by Michael Mumma of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland first detected the gas in 2003, using infrared spectrometers on three Earth-based telescopes, the team said Thursday. At its peak, the plumes contained about 19,000 metric tons of methane, a large amount comparable to the seep off Coal Oil Point near Santa Barbara.
The source of the methane is still a mystery, the scientists said in a briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington. But its existence proves that Mars is not the dead desert planet that many scientists thought it was.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Pic of the Day
Barren: Located on the eastern part of Echus Chasma is this cliff which is up to 4,000 metres high
Monday, July 21, 2008
Pic of the Day
Echus Chasma is the source region of Kasei Valles, which extends 3,000km to the north
Friday, July 18, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Watch The Phoenix Mars Probe Landing at 6
At approximately 6 pm EST time watch the Phoenix Mars Probe landing at NASA tv.
The mission for the Phoenix Mars probe is to study the history of water and habitability potential in the Martian arctic's ice-rich soil.
