Data from the now defunct Mars Global Surveyor suggest that instead of protecting Mars’ thin atmosphere, the Red Planet’s spotty magnetic field may have helped the solar wind strip it, one piece at a time.
Emily Lakdawalla explains how the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter camera works, the trickery involved in aiming it where they thought the Phoenix Lander would be as it descended to Mars, and why the resulting image looks the way it did.
As if the image of the Phoenix lander parachuting towards Mars was not awesome enough, the Mars Recon Orbiter team released the full image where the spacecraft is a little white speck in the foreground of an enormous crater.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught an image of the Mars Phoenix Lander after it had deployed its parachute just before its landing on the plains of the Martian Arctic.
The HiRise camera on the Mars Surveillance Orbiter caught an avalanche in progress on the edge of the northern polar cap. Awesome.
Google’s on Mars now. This is a great toy. There’s a gazetteer built in, so you can go to spacecraft crash landing sites, and geological features. The infrared images from the Mars Odyssey orbiter provide the highest resolution close up. I hope Google will incorporate images from the Reconnaissance Orbiter as updates. Very nice, but [...]
Sending a robot drilling rig to look for subsurface ice on Mars would be a tricky mission. Arizona State University scientist Phil Christensen proposes another way. Launch a quarter ton copper projectile at the mid-latitudes of Mars’ Northern Hemisphere, and look for water in the ejecta from the ten to 25 meter deep crater it [...]
A QuickTime movie in ‘true’ color made from a panorama stitched together from images taken by the Spirit Rover atop Husband Hill in Gusev Crater, Mars. Thanks Cornell, JPL, and NASA. You helped cheer me up.
Spirit, one of the Mars Exploration Rovers, reached the top of Husband Hill. Great view, huh?
The Mars Rover Opportunity drove up to the wreckage of its discarded heat shield. The shield made a nice divot on the surface.
I’m looking at a high-resolution photo from the Mars Express orbiter of the Mariner Valley, and see a dark, lens-shaped smudge on the left hand side of the image. There’s a crater with ejecta marks at the top of the smudge. Would that be consistent with a recent impact kicking up and depositing darker material [...]
Meanwhile, Spirit and Opportunity are still boppin’ away on Mars. Spirit’s in the hills a couple of miles from where it landed back in January, so it has some great views. I’ve been waiting for these shots. Until this year, we had to imagine what the scene would be like.
Kees Veenenbos made beautiful renders of what a wet Mars may have looked like. He used radar altimeter data from the Mars Orbiters and fed it into the Terragen program.
Mars 3, the silent Soviet lander, has started radioing reports back to Earth. For some strange reason, the transmissions end up on Live Journal.
[ via Boing Boing ] Kim Stanley Robinson essay on Mars for the NYT.