Tag archives for mars
Posted by August 20, 1975: A Titan 3/Centaur rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the Viking 1 spacecraft, the first NASA mission to put a lander on Mars. Moments after touchdown on July 20, 1976, Viking 1 sent the first-ever picture taken from the surface of the red planet: A portrait of the artist as a…
Well, who knows at this stage whether NASA will ever get its next-generation ATHLETE rover onto the moon or Mars. But at least we can rest assured it’ll provide any future astronauts with hours of entertainment: From moon buggy to moon boogie.
Curiosity, as compared with the Mars rover Spirit. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL No matter where you stand on the future of human space flight, if you want to visit other worlds, you are probably a fan of robotic exploration. Still, there’re a lot of hurdles to putting even a robot on another planet: budget, scientific squabbling,…
On Monday U.S. President Barack Obama officially released his policy for the nation’s space program, a 14-pager that backs up what many media outlets have been covering as the likely direction for NASA and beyond. The highlights: cooperate with other governments on Earth- and sun-monitoring satellites that feed us vital data on climate change and…
NG Weekend: Bonobo Handshake
Posted by Ford Cochran on June 5, 2010 This week on National Geographic Weekend radio, host Boyd Matson speaks with guests about bonobos, Mars rovers, the National Geographic Bee, New Guinea wildlife, elephants, Greenland, growing up Maasai, and the mysterious Red Sea rooster. Hour 1 When Vanessa Woods fell in love with a primate researcher, she soon found herself on a plane to…
Look to the southwest in tonight’s sky, and if it’s a clear night, you’ll see the ruddy dot of Mars just to the right of the bright star Regulus, which will sit almost directly above the first-quarter moon. Once you’ve found Mars, send a mental high-five in that direction: There’s a little robot trundling across…
Capping off weeks of rumor and speculation, U.S. President Barack Obama formally unveiled his proposed plan for NASA yesterday, an interesting mix of caution and ambition that makes some significant tweaks to his predecessor’s push for a human return to the moon. Among the main points, Obama is saying we should skip the moon and…
Update: Even as I was typing this, the HiRISE team was posting a brand-new picture of a Martian avalanche! Check it out below … Spring is in bloom on Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, melting snows, coaxing out budding leaves on trees, and otherwise making its mark on the landscape. On northern Mars, spring has been revving…
Critics of science shows on TV often complain about what seems like a gratuitous number of crashes and explosions that are tangential to the science. Luckily for those of us covering astronomy, the universe is a breeding ground for violent impacts. —Image copyright BASE Productions/Sauce After all, the whole thing started with a bang. Since…
In real life, humankind may be taking its sweet time to get to the Red Planet, but in the movies, we’ve been there hundreds of times. The latest iteration in the voyage to our planet’s red sibling comes in the form of Mars, an indie animated romantic comedy from Austin, Tx-based director, animator, and writer…
No, Arizona, the space agency will not be making a visit to your lovely but likely unharmed state capital. Instead, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are hoping against hope that the Phoenix Mars Lander might have somehow made it through harsh winter conditions at its final resting place in the Martian arctic. Phoenix amid…
Looking for a truly geeked-out way to spread holiday cheer? Hubble’s got your back. The space telescope’s imaging team combined some of Hubble’s prettiest pictures with seasonal designs to create “messages of joy and peace … illuminated by the natural splendor of the universe.” Check it: Featuring supernova remnant 1006 6,850 light-years away Picture combines…
The Mars rovers are true survivors. Although Spirit and Opportunity were slated to work for just 90 Martian days, they’ve been putting in some serious overtime—they’re now at just over 2,000 days on the job and counting. For its part, Spirit has continued toiling away on Mars even after it broke a “foot,” wore down…
Alien cultures might be happy to know that if we humans ever do start colonizing the universe, we may have a few problems going forth and multiplying. A team of Japanese scientists has found that microgravity significantly lowers the birth rate in mammals, based on their study of mice embryos subjected to space-like conditions in…
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Those of you who think it’s cool to drill into Google Maps and find, for example, your car sitting in your driveway, probably know that it’s all about coming to a resolution. The higher a camera’s resolution, the more details you can capture in a single image, and the deeper…
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University Dubbed “Block Island,” the conspicuous space rock is now the largest confirmed meteorite found on the red planet, NASA announced today. The Mars rover Opportunity snapped the above portrait of Block Island on July 31, as it moved in closer to touch the meteorite. Opportunity’s examinations revealed that the two-foot-wide object…
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech Today NASA announced that its next flagship Mars rover has been granted a name: Curiosity. Sixth-grader Clara Ma of Lenexa, Kansas, penned an essay about the concept of curiosity that won her the right to name the new probe, an SUV-size rover that will be the largest, most technically capable craft yet…
Any allergy sufferer will tell you that dust can be a killer. But those dust bunnies under the couch have nothing on the planet-wide storms that periodically engulf Mars in late spring and early summer. —Image courtesy NASA, J. Ball (Cornell), M. Wolff (SSI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Such storms are kind of…
Is it mold on a bathroom wall? A close-up of a Dalmatian? The results of a tragic toner-cartridge accident? —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona In fact, it’s a Martian volcano in the process of defrosting. The ancient cauldron is part of a group of volcanoes that rings the Hellas impact basin on the red planet’s…
In the animal world, the fight-or-flight instinct is a pretty common response to danger. But when you’re a multimillion-dollar spacecraft, caution is usually the only response you get preprogrammed with. Adding to poor beleaguered NASA’s spate of recent glitches, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter went into safe mode on Monday after suffering what appears to have…
[2-6-09 update: now with video!] In case you are curious but a tad download-shy, I spent a little time exploring Mars today via Google Earth and took a selection of screen shots. I think I’m in love with the colorized topography layer, which makes abundantly clear the huge demarcation between the southern basin and the…
Those sneaky folks at Google. Even as waves of coverage come pouring forth about the newly launched oceans layer in Google Earth, a short NASA press release and no more than a few lines in a couple news articles note that, oh, yeah, and by the way, there’s a new 3-D Mars layer too. Wha?!?!?…
By now folks used to reading about Mars have gotten pretty spoiled by the amazing images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This fabulous camera came online in 2006 and returned its first color images of Mars in 2007. The current catalog of more than 8,700 images is…
For a planet at the center of so many discussions about life, Mars can seem like a really dead world. It’s cold, dry, and dusty with a thin atmosphere that doesn’t block out much solar radiation. There’s minerals and gullies that suggest water flowed there more than three billion years ago, but aside from a…
Great stars don’t die, they just fade away. It’s been almost two months since NASA lost contact with the Phoenix Mars Lander, which had been studying icy soils near the red planet’s north pole. The lander’s surface stereo imager made a mosaic to show the craft from a few feet in the air—that black spot…
