February 19th, 2021
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From the “you don’t say!” department of NASA space price tags, exploring the Red Planet is an expensive undertaking. A new infographic from Statista offers a snap shot of NASA missions to Mars, revealing that the Perseverance rover remains the 7th most costly spacecraft in the history of the space agency’s planetary exploration program […]
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As the full-stop destination of NASA Perseverance’s journey from Earth to Mars, the mega-rover is slated to set down within Jezero Crater – a lake in the Red Planet’s ancient past, a place that sports a shoreline that dried up billions of years ago. On ancient Mars, water carved channels and transported sediments to form […]
Water is the elixir of life. On Mars, utilizing subsurface frozen water ice can help prolong future human exploration of the Red Planet. New research spotlights potential buried ice deposits to support the selection of human landing sites in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars. The work is an output of the Subsurface Water Ice Mapping […]
How to tame that “seven minutes of terror” the NASA Perseverance Mars mission will experience during its plunge through the Martian atmosphere? Part of the answer comes early in the deep dive to the Red Planet thanks to the Mars Entry Descent and Landing Instrumentation 2, or MEDLI2 for short. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now wrapping up Sol 3033 tasks. The Mars robot has been staying put and feasting on some bonus science, reports Sean Czarnecki, a planetary geologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “Our goal remains to traverse away from the rocks we have determined are clay-rich and toward the overlying […]
In anticipation of the February 18th arrival of NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars, Fridays For Future unveils “1%” – a “satirical tourism ad” for Mars, developed with FRED & FARID in Los Angeles, to awaken the 99% of humans who will have to stay on Earth. “Let’s face it, living on Earth isn’t so cool […]
Now circuiting Mars, China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft is slated to perform systematic checks of onboard equipment. The craft used its 3000 newton engine on February 15 to place it into a polar orbit around the Red Planet. Tipping the scales at 5 metric tons, Tianwen-1 – consisting of an orbiter, lander, and rover — will perform […]
“Pages of History” constitutes the seventh installment of “Apollo 17: Diary of the Twelfth Man.” It is Chapter 12 of the “Diary” with other chapters to follow. This chapter chronicles EVA-3, the continuation of the exploration of the lunar surface at Taurus-Littrow on the third day after landing, now over 48 years ago. Check […]
If you are in the NASA Mars exploration business, it is nail-biting time. Launched last July and barreling toward the Red Planet is the Perseverance rover, on target for a February 18 encapsulated, heat-resisting nosedive through the planet’s atmosphere. That fireball of an entry is followed by a sporty auto-controlled touchdown of the […]
In its on-the-ground Red Planet surveillance, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has catalogued a new set of large iron meteorites The distributions and compositions of iron meteorites are of interest in part because they can constrain models of physiochemical weathering experienced since the space rocks came to full-stop on Mars. These meteorites serve […]
