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Content with the tag: “mars”
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Phoenix Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended
Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last...
July 31, 2008 / Written by: NASA Press Release
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Astrobiologist Eigenbrode profiled in Goddard Tech Trends
Astrobiologist Jennifer Eigenbrode is profiled in the latest issue of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Goddard Tech Trends (Vol. 4, #4, summer 2008), published by the Office of the Chief Technologist.
Eigenbrode is a biogeochemist and an expert at detecting organic compounds in rocks. She is a member of the Goddard team that is building the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite...
July 9, 2008 / Written by: Linda Billings
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Phoenix Scrapes 'Almost Perfect' Icy Soil For Analysis
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander enlarged the “Snow White” trench and scraped up little piles of icy soil on Saturday, June 28, the 33rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Scientists say that the scrapings are ideal for the lander’s analytical instruments.
The robotic arm on Phoenix used the blade on its scoop to make 50 scrapes in the icy layer buried under subsurface soil. The robotic arm then heaped the scrapings into a...
July 1, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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Phoenix Returns Treasure Trove for Science
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander performed its first wet chemistry experiment on Martian soil flawlessly yesterday, returning a wealth of data that for Phoenix scientists was like winning the lottery.
“We are awash in chemistry data,” said Michael Hecht of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA, instrument on Phoenix. “We’re trying to understand what is the chemistry of wet soil on Mars, what’s dissolved in it, how acidic or alkaline...
June 26, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt -
Can the Martian Arctic Support Extreme Life?
ABC.com features NASA’s Phoenix lander and the search for life on Mars in a new article on their Technology and Science website. Harkening back to Viking, and citing new discoveries of microbes in Greenland’s glaciers, the article focuses on the need to understand the microbiology of Earth’s extreme environments in order to best search for life on other planets.
June 25, 2008 / Posted by: Daniella Scalice
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Phoenix Shake and Bake
In this interview, William Boynton talks about the TEGA instrument on the Phoenix Lander, and explains what it can tell us about the possibility for life on Mars.
June 23, 2008 / Written by: Astrobiology Magazine
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Bright Chunks At Phoenix Lander's Mars Site Must Have Been Ice
Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.
“It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright...
June 19, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Inspects Delivered Soil Samples
New observations from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander provide the most magnified view ever seen of Martian soil, showing particles clumping together even at the smallest visible scale.
June 13, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Delivers Soil Sample To Microscope
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander sprinkled a spoonful of Martian soil Wednesday onto the sample wheel of the spacecraft’s robotic microscope station, images received early Thursday confirmed.
“It looks like a light dusting and that’s just what we wanted. The Robotic Arm team did a great job,” said Michael Hecht of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. He is the lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA) instrument on Phoenix.
The delivery of scooped-up soil...
June 13, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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NASA's Phoenix Lander Has an Oven Full of Martian Soil
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has filled its first oven with Martian soil.
“We have an oven full,” Phoenix co-investigator Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said today. “It took 10 seconds to fill the oven. The ground moved.”
Boynton leads the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument, or TEGA, for Phoenix. The instrument has eight separate tiny ovens to bake and sniff the soil to assess its volatile ingredients, such as water.
The lander’s Robotic Arm delivered a partial scoopful...
June 11, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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Sprinkle to Taste
Phoenix was unable to chew on the clumpy martian soil, so the team operating the Lander plans to sprinkle the soil instead. The spoonful of soil will fall onto a wheel, which will then rotate the sample so the Lander’s eagle eye — the Optical Microscope — can see it.June 10, 2008 / Written by: Astrobiology Magazine -
Making Sense of Mars Methane
Research on methane at a Mexican salt flat could help reveal the source of methane that has been detected in the atmosphere of Mars. But first scientists have to decipher the unique – and seemingly contradictory – isotopic signature of the Mexican methane.
June 9, 2008 / Written by: David Tenenbaum, Astrobiology Magazine
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Phoenix Links for May 29th
The NASA Phoenix Mars Lander link round-up for May 29, 2008:
Another Phoenix Descent Photo. This one is even sharper with a large crater in the background.
Signal From Mars Is Restored [New York Times]
Listen to Mars Phoenix descend! Courtesy of ESA’s Mars Express
IBM RAD6000 About the onboard computer on the Phoenix lander and numerous other NASA spacecraft. It has...
May 29, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Phoenix Lander Link Round-up
The NASA Phoenix Mars Lander link round-up for May 28, 2008:
Orbiter Relays Second-Day Information From NASA Mars Lander From JPL.
Mars Phoenix Mission: Meet the Arm An interview with Honeybee Robotic’s Project Engineer, Dustin Roberts about the Phoenix Lander’s sampling arm. [YouTube]
Phoenix Mars Mission: Entry, Descent and Landing From NASA TV on YouTube.
Mars Phoenix Lander In Second Life A short video of the Mars Lander in Second Life. [YouTube]
May 28, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Erosion on Earth and Mars: Mere Seepage or Megaflood?
Researchers from NAI’s University of California, Berkeley Team have a new study in this week’s Science focused on Box Canyon in Idaho. Incised into a basaltic plain with no drainage network upstream, and approximately 10 cubic meters per second of seepage emanating from its vertical headwall, the canyon is a veritable poster child of groundwater seepage erosion. But this new study posits evidence that the canyon’s formation was caused rather...
May 28, 2008 / Posted by: Daniella Scalice
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MRO Snaps Phoenix
Sure, it just looks like a picture of two little white dots and a line on a mottled gray background. But it’s actually one of the most amazing photographs ever taken.As NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft made its descent through the martian atmosphere on Sunday, May 25, another spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), orbiting high above, snapped this image of Phoenix suspended beneath its 40-foot-wide parachute. At the time, Phoenix was hurtling through...
May 27, 2008 / Written by: Henry Bortman
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Inside NASA's Mars Mission
Wired published an annotated photo gallery entitled Inside NASA’s Mars Mission with images of the giant antennas that will receive signals from the NASA Phoenix Lander. There are also photographs of Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Phoenix lands on May 25, 2008.
May 23, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Rendezvous with Mars
NASA’s Phoenix lander is less than a week from touch down in the frozen northern wastes of Mars, where it will search for signs that, in the planet’s recent past, the region may have been habitable.
Phoenix is the first mission to target Mars’ northern polar region. NASA’s Mars Polar Lander (MPL), launched in 1999 toward the planet’s southern pole, crashed upon landing.
The two Vikings missions, Pathfinder, Opportunity and Spirit all landed “in the dry regions of the equatorial zone,”...
May 20, 2008 / Written by: Henry Bortman
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Is There Life on Mars? Ask a Magnet.
Between three and four billion years ago, Mars was a lot like Earth. Both planets are believed to have had surface water. Those similarities make it a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life. “The assumption is that if bacterial life emerged on Earth at that time, then why not on Mars?” says Soon Sam Kim, principal member of technical staff...May 5, 2008 / Written by: James Kling
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AbSciCon '08: The Astrobiology Universe
The opening speaker at the 2008 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon), Lord Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge, said that our universe may just be one of many. Multiple universes could be stacked sideways like sheets of paper, separated by only a thin margin of space. We would never know they were there unless we could be awakened to the existence of that other dimension.This could have been the theme...
April 28, 2008 / Written by: Leslie Mullen
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New Mineral Points the Way for Search for Life on Mars
NASA’s Mars Odyssey Orbiter science team has located numerous sites in the southern highlands on Mars that show spectral characteristics consistent with chloride minerals. Many of these mineral deposits lie in basins with channels leading to them, implying long term water flow. The team dates the deposits at roughly 3.5-3.9 billion years ago. Because salt deposits can be seen as a proxy for water, and salt on Earth is...
March 20, 2008 / Written by: Daniella Scalice
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Mars Science Laboratory Shakedown in the High Arctic
Members of the AMASE team (AMASE stands for Arctic Mars Analog Svalbard Expedition) last month completed their fourth field season on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. They went to test out instruments similar to those that will fly on an upcoming mission to Mars, and to perform a field test of a prototype rover, Cliff-bot, that is capable of climbing up and down 80-degree slopes.
Spitsbergen is the largest island in the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, which lies between...
February 1, 2008 / Posted by: Yael Kovo
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MISSes on Mars? Let’s look
The January 2008 issue of the journal Geobiology is dedicated to the subject of microbially induced sedimentary structures (MISSes), a topic of interest in astrobiology. Nora Noffke, a Principal Investigator in the Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, is guest editor of this special issue.
Noffke is an associate professor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Noffke’s research interests include, in addition to astrobiology, the biosedimentary dynamics of siliciclastic...
January 22, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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The First Astrobiologist Astronaut?
Kim Binstead from NAI’s University of Hawai’i Team, just back from a Mars Society-sponsored simulated mission to Mars in the Canadian High Arctic, says she plans to respond to NASA’s recent call for astronaut candidates. Good Luck Kim!
September 27, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Astrobiology in the Comics
Today’s “Prickly City” comic strip features the work of Norbert Schorghofer of NAI’s University of Hawai’i Team. Apparently, understanding the history of ice ages on Mars doesn’t have a positive effect!
September 23, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Astrobiotechnology Chip Successfully Launched
Andrew Steele of NAI’s CIW Team, a leader in astrobiotechnology for many years, is behind this current experiment, called the “Life Marker Chip.” A collection of immunoassays which have the potential to detect trace levels of biomarkers in the Martian environment, it launched earlier this week on ESA’s BIOPAN 6 experiment platform. The craft will spend 12 days in orbit, during which time the onboard experiments, including the Chip, will be exposed to microgravity.
September 19, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Martian Ice Ages
Norbert Schorghofer of NAI’s University of Hawai’i Team has a new paper in this week’s Nature describing a climate model he developed which accounts for the advance and retreat of the subsurface martian ice layers. The model reveals forty major ice ages over the past five million years, and explains the present distribution of subsurface ice on Mars. His findings outline expectations of ice stratigraphy at the NASA Mars Phoenix Mission’s landing site.
September 12, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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MISSIONS - Phoenix Takes Flight
NASA’s Phoenix lander heads for Mars’s frozen north.
Phoenix is on its way to Mars. The latest spacecraft in NASA’s program of Mars exploration launched from Cape Canaveral on August 4 of this year, and is scheduled to land in the planet’s northern polar region on May 25, 2008. Its findings will help scientists answer a critical question about the Red Planet: was it ever habitable?
Phoenix is in many ways similar to the two Viking landers sent...
September 3, 2007 / Posted by: Yael Kovo -
Phoenix Prepares for Flight
Scheduled for launch in August 2007, the Phoenix Mars Mission is designed to study the history of water and habitability potential in the Martian arctic’s ice-rich soil. A new teaser animation about the mission is available – click here to view it.
July 19, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Methane in the Martian Atmosphere
Scientists from NAI’s IPTAI Team have a paper out in Geophysical Research Letters detailing a new mechanism for recent methane release on Mars. Their results show that increasing salinity can cause destabilization of subsurface methane hydrates, and that active thermal or pressure fluctuations are not required to account for the presence of methane in the atmosphere.
June 17, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Evidence for Ancient Ocean on Mars
Scientists from NAI’s University of California, Berkeley Team have a new paper out in Nature outlining evidence for the presence of an ancient ocean on Mars. The study points to a large body of liquid water at the pole which could have shifted Mars’ spin axis. This shift would have in turn deformed the shoreline of this ocean relative to the rest of the surface topography, in accordance with observations.
June 13, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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MISSIONS - Martian Clay
For the past two years, NASA’s stalwart rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have stolen most of the Mars headlines. In particular, the discovery by Opportunity of sulfate minerals on Mars confirmed what many scientists had suspected, that Mars, although now thoroughly dried out, had a watery past.
But another spacecraft, Mars Express, sent into orbit two years ago by the European Space Agency (ESA), has been expanding our understanding the history of water on Mars. Onboard Mars Express is...
April 24, 2007 / Posted by: Yael Kovo -
An Update from "Mars"
EVA continues at the Mars Desert Research Station where graduate student Irene Schneider from the NAI Penn State team is currently on expedition: “Biology: Encountered pond with trees on second stop, unique flower sample collected. Geology: First stop discovered small alcove in Morrison formation about 15 feet deep. Second stop yielded lake discussed above. Third stop found about 3 petrified tree stumps on ridge. Petrified wood and conglomerate samples collected. Astronomy: attempted but due to high winds and...
April 9, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Extreme Life in China's Deserts
Searching for clues to the potential for life on Mars, NASA astrobiologists recently explored microbial communities in China’s northwest region-some of the world’s oldest, driest and most remote deserts. They found evidence suggesting that conditions there may be similar to those in certain regions of Mars. The study was funded in part by Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP).
March 21, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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NAI Graduate Student Selected to Help Plan for Future Mars EVA
NAI graduate student Irene Schneider from Penn State has been selected by NASA/Mars Society as crew physicist for the upcoming expedition 61 for the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS). MDRS Crew 61 is a two week mission simulation where NASA, in collaboration with The Mars Society, simulates future manned missions to Mars. There she will be developing and helping implement the first Extra-Vehicular Activity emergency radiation protocols.
February 28, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Liquid Water on Mars: Is It Still Flowing?
The scientific strategy of NASA’s Mars exploration can be summarized as “Follow the water.” The habitability of Mars, past or present, is intimately tied to the presence of liquid water. Since the first orbiting spacecraft, Mariner 9, surveyed the planet in the early 1970s, we have known that the Mars polar caps are composed in part of ice, and we have seen large channels cut by water that flowed on the surface billions of years ago. Two of the most important recent discoveries on Mars were “gullies” that indicate much more recent surface flows, less than a million years old, and the evidence from rovers on the surface that shallow ponds or seas of salty water must have once existed, although they may have been transient. However, all these indications of surface water are old – whether the age is measured in millions or billions of years. Now, in what looks to be one of the most important recent discoveries about Mars, we have photographic evidence that flows of liquid water have taken place in the past seven years! The change of perspective from billions or millions of years to something that happened in the twenty-first century could be profound.
January 9, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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NAI Scientists Successfully Drill into Subglacial Lake
Last month, scientists from NAI’s University of Hawai’i Team, in collaboration with Icelandic research institutes, successfully drilled into and sampled a lake deep beneath a glacier in Iceland. The lake and other subglacial lakes are the focus of studies of life in “extreme environments,” and may resemble potential habitats on Mars and icy satellites in the outer Solar System
July 6, 2006 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Arctic, Antarctic, Mars
The city of Hammerfest lies at the northern tip of Norway, well above the Arctic Circle. If you board a ship heading north from there, just before you reach the polar ice cap you run into a group of islands known as the Svalbard archipelago.
For the past two summers, a group of scientists has traveled to the largest of these islands to study an environment that sheds light on a notorious meteorite, discovered at the opposite end of the...
June 19, 2006 / Posted by: Yael Kovo -
Chemical Energy for Life on Early Earth and Mars
Researchers from NAI’s NASA Ames Research Center and University of Colorado, Boulder Teams published in the current issue of Astrobiology their study of the petrology and mineral chemistry of a cold spring in Northern California. They propose that the serpentinization process can provide a source of energy for chemosynthetic organisms, and outline criteria to aid in the identification of serpentinizing terranes on Mars.
June 5, 2006 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Abiogenic Explanation for Methane on Mars
Researchers from NAI’s Indiana Princeton Tennessee Astrobiology Initiative Team published their theory on the origin of the detected atmospheric methane on Mars in the current issue of Astrobiology. Measurements of deep fracture water samples from South Africa led to a model which distinguishes between abiogenic and microbial methane sources based upon their isotopic composition, and couples microbial methane production to molecular hydrogen generation by water radiolysis. The authors also propose an instrument for future missions to Mars which, with...
May 30, 2006 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Imaging the Unseen
Researchers from NAI’s University of California, Los Angeles Team have pioneered a new imaging technique which allows them to non-destructively produce 3D images of ancient fossils. The technique, combining confocal microscopy and Raman spectroscopy, could be used on samples returned from Mars by future NASA missions. Their work on 650 million year old fossils from Kazakhstan is published in the February, 2006 issue of Astrobiology.
April 12, 2006 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Alternative Model for Diagenesis of Meridiani Bedrock
Tom McCollom of NAI’s University of Colorado Lead Team and his co-author Brian Hynek published the details of their alternative model today in Nature. The scenario does not require prolonged interaction with a standing body of surface water, and describes an environment less favorable to biological activity on Mars.
December 20, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Mars Rover Opportunity and Rio Tinto
NAI Affiliate Members at the Centro de Astrobiologia, and others have one of eight research articles focusing on Opportunity in this month’s Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The paper explores the relationship between Meridiani and Rio Tinto, specifically how studying the river can help facilitate an understanding of Meridiani mineral precipitation and diagenesis, as well as astrobiological implications.
December 15, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Living on Mars Time
When NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover-A, more affectionately known as “Spirit,” touches down in Gusev Crater, it will be approximately 8:30 PM, January 3rd, 2004, at mission control. That’s Pacific Standard Time (PST), because mission control is located on the grounds of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California.
When time is the topic, however, Pacific Standard tells only part of Spirit’s story. Scientists and engineers will also be keeping track of UTC...
December 15, 2005 / Posted by: Yael Kovo -
Finding Life in Mars Analog Sites on Earth
Andrew Steel of the NAI Carnegie Team and other scientists have recently tested life-detection instruments designed for Mars at the Arctic Mars Analog site in a Norwegian volcano. In a press release, Hans Amundsen of the University of Oslo said “The instruments detected both living and fossilized organisms, which is the kind of evidence we’d be searching for on the Red Planet.” One instrument, designed by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), detected “minute quantities of aromatic...
October 4, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Digging in the Dirt on Mars
The following report is based on a short paper “The Enigma of the Martian Soil” by Amos Banin of the NAI SETI Institute Team, published in Science.
August 28, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Preparing for TPF: Disk-Averaged Synthetic Spectra of Mars
In this month’s issue of Astrobiology, members of NAI’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory Team published a study using their model of a Mars-like planet to ascertain the detectability of a planet’s surface and atmospheric properties from disk-averaged spectra.
August 17, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Robot Astrobiology Rover
NAI astrobiologists are involved in developing a prototype robotic astrobiologist to explore the driest desert on Earth, in preparation for later flights to Mars. This Astrobiology Magazine story is based on a news release from Carnegie Mellon University.
August 14, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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What Yellowstone Teaches Us about Ancient Mars
NAI scientists study Yellowstone National park as an analog for thermal areas that probably existed on Mars long ago. This SPACE.com article by Leonard David also tells how visitors to the park are learning about astrobiology.
August 11, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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The Enigma of the Martian Soil
Amos Banin from NAI’s SETI Institute Team discusses the state of knowledge about the Martian soil in this week’s Science “Perspectives.” He looks specifically at information gained from past missions, and the role water processing may have played in soil formation.
August 4, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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A Cause for Methane on Mars
Members of NAI’s UCLA Lead Team published a paper in this month’s Geophysical Research Letters describing how hydrothermal fluid processes driven by a small subsurface magmatic intrusion can produce methane on Mars.
July 19, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Wading in Martian Water
The European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft has been orbiting Mars for over a year. While the high resolution images of the planet’s many craters, volcanoes, and other features get the most notice, the spacecraft’s seven instruments have also gathered large amounts of data about the planet’s atmosphere, geology, and chemistry. Bernard Foing, ESA Chief Scientist, provides on overview of the most notable discoveries made during Europe’s first trip to the Red Planet.
June 9, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Could Impacts Have Caused Flooding on Mars?
NAI scientists on the University of California, Berkeley team describe, in a recent issue of Icarus, how meteoritic impacts on Mars may have caused Earth-like saturated soil liquefaction and potentially enabled violent groundwater eruption. Enough water, they say, could have been erupted to produce floods and outflow channels.
May 16, 2005 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Carbonated Mars
Here on Earth the only way to make carbonate rocks is with the aid of liquid water. Finding such rocks on Mars might prove, once and for all, that the barren Red Planet was once warm and wet.
February 13, 2001 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Seeing Mars Through a Test Tube
By recreating the Martian surface in the laboratory, NASA scientists may have begun to answer two questions: why the Martian surface is so red, and why organic life has not yet been found there.
February 8, 2001 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Mars Ocean Hypothesis Hits the Shore
Photographs of the Martian surface find no sign of a sea cliff along a possible ancient shoreline.
January 25, 2001 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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The Greening of the Red Planet
A hardy microbe from Earth may one day transform the barren ground of Mars into arable soil.
January 22, 2001 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Thawing Mars
Greenhouse gases might one day be used to warm the cold surface of Mars, and make the planet habitable for humans.
January 21, 2001 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Martian Micromagnets
The Allan Hills meteorite from Mars is peppered with tiny magnetic crystals that on our planet are made only by bacteria.
January 3, 2001 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Evidence Of Martian Land Of Lakes Discovered
Layers of sedimentary rock paint a portrait of an ancient Mars that may have featured numerous lakes and shallow seas.
December 13, 2000 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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New Images Suggest Present-day Source of Liquid Water on Mars
Using data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, imaging scientists have observed features that suggest there may be current sources of liquid water at or near the surface of the red planet.
December 11, 2000 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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The Case of the Missing Water
Did an ancient flood cover the northern lowlands? Mars Orbiter images give a front row seat.
December 10, 2000 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Back to the Surface: NASA’s 2003 Mission to Mars
Two Mars rovers, one in May and the other in June of 2003 will land six months later at different locations. Both take on the daunting task of probing for water clues.
December 6, 2000 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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NASA Astrobiology Architect, Dr. Gerald Soffen, Remembered
NASA Scientist Dr. Gerald Soffen, who led the Viking science team that performed the first experiments on the surface of the planet Mars and a key architect of the Astrobiology Institute, is fondly remembered.
December 3, 2000 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Mars Lakes
A ‘young’ Martian lake would be at least half-billion years old, but Martian deltas might not seem as remote as the present day desert.
November 26, 2000 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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