mars

A six-second rocket firing Tuesday nudged NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter into position to relay telemetry from the Mars Science Laboratory back to Earth in near real time during the $2.5 billion rover's rocket-powered descent to the red planet's surface on August 6, officials said.

Odyssey entered "safe mode" July 11 after problems with the craft's attitude control system, raising the possibility that the orbiter might not be properly positioned to relay entry, descent and landing data from the rover back to Earth.

While the Curiosity rover will be sending X-band signal tones directly … Read more

Unexpected problems with a NASA science satellite in orbit around Mars could briefly delay receipt of telemetry from the agency's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory rover during the spacecraft's dramatic 7-minute descent to the surface August 6, officials said Monday.

While the issue with the orbiting Odyssey satellite will have no effect on the rover's ability to successfully execute its autonomous entry, descent, and landing sequence -- half jokingly dubbed "Seven Minutes of Terror" by project engineers -- it could mean an additional period of nail-biting before confirmation that the so-called "sky crane&… Read more

In just 41 days, on August 5, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover will touch down on the Red Planet, and this will be no ordinary landing. In fact, NASA has dubbed the descent "Seven Minutes of Terror."

"When people look at it, it looks crazy," senior EDL engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Adam Steltzner said in a new video by NASA on the rover landing. "It is the result of reasoned engineering thought, but it still looks crazy."

The recently released video (see below) outlines exactly how crazy the feat of landing … Read more

NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory rover is in good shape and on target for a nail-biting seven-minute plunge to a bull's-eye landing on the red planet in early August, thanks to upgraded software and post-launch improvements that will enable the craft to make a more precise descent to the floor of Gale Crater, mission managers said Monday.

While engineers are continuing to troubleshoot a contamination issue with Teflon seals inside a high-tech rock drill on the rover's robot arm, the project scientist said he is confident workarounds will be in place by the time the … Read more

MarsEdit makes blogging easier, letting you ditch clunky browser-based editing in favor of a full-featured, fully Mac-powered desktop editor--an editor that also lets you blog when you're offline. You get a rich editing interface for working with text (including HTML-free formatting tools and cool markup macros that save you from repetitive typing), but what makes MarsEdit really useful is its easy uploading tools, two-way syncing, AppleScript support, tight integration with Flickr, and compatibility with an impressive variety of blog services (including improved support for WordPress tags), text editors, and even photo management software (like iPhoto and Lightroom).

With nice … Read more

We have lift-off! It's a new era for social media, space exploration and... shoes?

Update: The SpaceX rocket launch was aborted at the last minute and rescheduled for Tuesday, May 22 at 3:44 a.m. Eastern.

Facebook ended its first publicly traded day right where it began: at $38 a share. CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang in the Nasdaq opening bell virtually from the Silicon Valley campus, and later, shares began trading at around $42 each. Facebook's bankers saved the IPO, keeping shares barely above $38. From this IPO, Facebook raised $16 billion. That's almost 10 times … Read more

Neil deGrasse Tyson was born the same week in 1958 that NASA was founded. Luck of the draw, perhaps, but the stars clearly have been aligned for a man who today is America's most famous astrophysicist (not to mention director of New York's prestigious Hayden Planetarium).

In recent years, Tyson has also taken on the role of popular educator -- if not public intellectual -- making the case for bigger national investment in space exploration and research. The thrust of his argument is that the pursuit of bold "space adventures" would have the salutary side effect … Read more

NASA is trying to shed any "not invented here" attitude for its next missions to Mars.

The space agency announced Friday it is enlisting the help of scientists and engineers worldwide to lay plans for sending a robot to Mars. The planning group's ultimate mission is to send humans to Mars by the 2030s.

NASA is organizing a meeting, called Concepts and Approaches for Mars Exploration, at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, in June. Scientists and technologists can submit ideas for papers online, some of which will be presented at the conference.

The robotic … Read more

Scientists believe that a reanalysis of soil samples taken during a Viking mission nearly 30 years ago again shows strong evidence of microbial life on Mars.

In a paper this month published in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences, scientists described performing new experiments and drawing on more recent understanding of the Mars environment to reach a conclusion opposite to one reached decades ago regarding the building blocks of life on Mars.

Controversy has surrounded the original experiments, called the Labeled Release (LR), done on the soil samples during the Viking mission in 1976, according to the paper'… Read more