http://www.marsdaily.com/index.html Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST en-us NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., invites the public to its annual Open House on Saturday, June 9, and Sunday, June 10, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event, themed "Great Journeys," will take visitors on a "ride" through the wonders of space. Highlights include a life-size model of Mars Science Laboratory, the NASA/JPL spacecraft currently bound for Mars; demonstrations from ]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST Rural Eastern Washington will become a testing ground in support of a mission to explore the Martian atmosphere for potential evidence of life under a recently funded NASA project developed by scientists from Cornell University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and Washington State University. The proposed mission is intended to help determine whether]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST After being stationary for 130 sols during the winter, Opportunity has resumed driving again. On Sol 2947 (May 8, 2012), the rover performed a 12-foot (3.7-meter) drive down from her winter perch, called "Greeley Haven." As expected, the rover's northerly tilt decrease from around 15 degrees down to about 8 degrees. All wheel currents, including the right-front wheel, were nominal. W]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST Team members of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission took a test rover to Dumont Dunes in California's Mojave Desert this week to improve knowledge of the best way to operate a similar rover, Curiosity, currently flying to Mars for an August landing. The test rover that they put through paces on various sandy slopes has a full-scale version of Curiosity's mobility system, but it is other]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST With its daily supply of solar energy increasing, NASA's durable Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has driven off the sunward-tilted outcrop, called Greeley Haven, where it worked during its fifth Martian winter. Opportunity's first drive since Dec. 26, 2011, took the rover about 12 feet (3.67 meters) northwest and downhill on Tuesday, May 8. The rover operations team at NASA's Jet Propul]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed that movement in sand dune fields on the Red Planet occurs on a surprisingly large scale, about the same as in dune fields on Earth. This is unexpected because Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, is only about one percent as dense, and its high-speed winds are less frequent and weaker than Earth's. For years, researchers debated wh]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST Last year, images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured sand dunes and ripples moving across the surface of Mars-observations that challenged previously held beliefs that there was not a lot of movement on the red planet's surface. Now, technology developed by a team at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has allowed scientists to measure these activities for the very fir]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST NASA's top scientists - including a Texas A and M University researcher - hope to find out how Mars' climate has evolved over billions of years, and answers could come soon in the mission involving Curiosity, a Volkswagen-sized rover that is headed toward the Red Planet and will land in early August. It was launched Nov. 26, 2011, and is traveling at 13,000 miles per hour. Once there, it c]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST Russia would be willing to be a partner with the United States on a manned mission to Mars, a Russian space official said at the United Nations. At U.N. headquarters to mark the International Day of Human Space Flight, Sergey Saveliev, deputy head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, said only international cooperation could make such a mission possible. "I have to say that current]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST European scientists said they'll undergo four months of freezing darkness and isolation in Antarctica in preparation for a possible manned trip to Mars. The experiment is part of a European Space Agency mission conducting scientific investigations into the affects and requirements of such a trip. The team of British, French and Italian scientists will test the limit of human endu]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST Challenged to design a background for a small rover controlled from space, students in Germany have delivered a futuristic cityscape. The cool space art will be seen by astronauts in orbit via the rover's camera eye as they remotely control their avatar later this year. The ultimate goal is for robot astronauts to roam around hazardous places like Mars and asteroids guided by human controllers s]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST The images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), carried on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft and operated by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR), were acquired on 21 June 2011 and show the transition zone between the western edge of Acidalia Planitia and the Martian highlands. Acidalia Planitia is a plain in the northern lowlands, lying ]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST The atmosphere of Mars is less than 1 percent the density of Earth's. It's one of the reasons liquid water covers much of our planet but cannot exist on the Red Planet. As more research points toward the possibility of water on early Mars, scientists have increased their studies on the density of its atmosphere billions of years ago. It's not an easy task. In fact, it's very difficult to e]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST A report in the May 4 edition of the journal Science details discoveries Opportunity made in its first four months at the rim of Endeavour Crater, including key findings reported at a geophysics conference in late 2011. Opportunity completed its original three-month mission on Mars eight years ago. It reached Endeavour last summer, three years after the rover's science team chose Endeavour]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST Opportunity is still positioned on the north end of Cape York on the rim of Endeavour Crater with an approximate 15-degree northerly tilt, but not for much longer. With the improvement in solar insolation and the recent modest dust cleaning events on the solar arrays, the project has determined that the rover has sufficient energy resources to begin moving again on level terrain. The]]> Wed, 16 MAY 2012 20:27:52 AEST