NASA's 2020 Rover for the Mission to Mars may be standing on its own six wheels these days, but that doesn't mean it's quite ready to blast off to the red planet. Having celebrated the milestone of being fully-assembled last month, the 2020 Rover has now headed into a Mars Simulation Chamber to see how it might handle conditions there.
NASA's Curiosity rover may not be on Mars primarily to act as a roving photographer, but that hasn't stopped it from sending back some seriously atmospheric shots of the red planet. The latest batch of images from Curiosity arrived over the weekend, and they show a haunting vista of the Martian terrain the rover plans to explore.
NASA has announced that the Insight Mars lander has run into an issue with one of its instruments. The instrument is the heat flow probe, also known as the mole. In an image that NASA released, the probe can be seen sticking out of the ground.
NASA's InSight rover has dug its 'mole' about two centimeters into the surface of Mars, the space agency announced today. This process involved the spacecraft's robotic arm, which is home to a heat probe NASA calls its 'mole.' The nickname refers to the probe's purpose: it digs down into the ground to determine how much heat is escaping from the Red Planet's interior.
The NASA Curiosity rover investigated a rock in Mars dubbed "Old Soaker" that scientists believe may have formed from the drying of a mud layer more than 3 billion years ago. The view in the image looks like it was taken from a very high altitude, but it is a close up of a smaller piece of rock.
NASA has checked another successful test off its list of work to finish ahead of the Mars 2020 spacecraft's mission to the Red Planet. The space agency has given the public a look at the project's team working on what NASA calls the descent-stage separation test, which involved using a crane to lift the large descent stage from the rover. The separation happened at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
NASA's InSight lander has sent back data that produced two audio recordings of quakes taking place on Mars. The space agency refers to these as 'peculiar' sounds, sharing each with the public as audio files anyone can download. The data was captured with a highly sensitive instrument called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), which is designed to pick up on vibrations resulting from things like a breeze.
The European Space Agency has published a new image showing a 'slice' of Mars, one that ranges from the planet's white cloud-covered north pole down through a band of pocked orange landscape to dark blue southern terrain. The image results from observations made by the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, offering a unique, colorful, and highly detailed look at the barren planet.
Southwest of Mars' Arabia Terra region lies a landmark called Danielson Crater, an impact crater that has existed on the planet for 'millions or billions' of years, according to NASA. At some point after the crater formed, sediment began to settle into the large hole in layers, slowly becoming cemented into place. Eons of formation and erosion have resulted in a striking landscape, one recently shared by NASA in a new image.
Mars is home to a dusty landscape painted with orange and brown hues, pocked with craters, and adorned with a variety of hills and mountains. Depending on where you look, Mars is also home to numerous sheer cliffs that look like long striations when captured from a distance and like near-vertical rock walls when snapped by the Martian rover. One of the latest images of these cliffs includes a clearly visible avalanche.
Scientists have been using a key tracer, isotopes of oxygen, to try and figure out how much atmosphere Mars lost. The problem they have had is that previous measurements have disagreed significantly. New observations by NASA-funded scientists have found that the amount of isotopes of oxygen vary depending on the time of day and the surface temperature of Mars.
Starting today, kindergarten through high school students located in the United States can submit essays to NASA's 'Name the Rover' contest. The space agency is soliciting name suggestions for its Mars 2020 rover, which will be launched for its mission to Mars next year. The contest will be open to students until November 1 and the final selection will be revealed early next year.