Mars – Page 23 – Spaceflight Now

Mars entry testbed to fly Monday after weather delays

June 7, 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA is gearing up to fly a balloon-launched, rocket-powered test vehicle from Hawaii on Monday to wring out the design of a new supersonic parachute and entry probe scientists hope to use on Mars one day.

Curiosity rover sees blue on the red planet

May 11, 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Curiosity rover has returned a stunning image of the sun dipping behind a distant ridge from a vista inside Mars’s Gale Crater, only the Martian sunset spectacle appears blue instead of the reddish hues seen on Earth.

UAE details ambitious plan for Martian weather satellite

May 8, 2015 Stephen Clark

Scientists from the United Arab Emirates have announced the Arab world’s first Mars probe will launch in July 2020 and collect global measurements of the Martian atmosphere.

Diverse destinations considered for new interplanetary probe

April 6, 2015 Stephen Clark

Science teams from across the United States have submitted 28 proposals for missions to explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, touch the asteroid-like satellites orbiting Mars, visit unseen worlds and hunt for objects that could strike Earth one day.

With memory restored, Opportunity rover completes marathon on Mars

March 25, 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Opportunity rover trekking across Mars completed a marathon’s worth of driving Tuesday, extending its record-setting exploration of the red planet as engineers installed a software fix to overcome a problem with the aging robot’s flash memory.

Glitch on Curiosity rover traced to drill mechanism

March 7, 2015 Stephen Clark

Officials are assessing how to adjust operations to collect future rock core samples with NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover after identifying its drill as the likely source of a short circuit that stopped the rover’s movement in late February.

Engineers analyzing short circuit on Mars rover

March 5, 2015 Stephen Clark

A short circuit that halted movement of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is not expected to keep the mobile robot stationary for long, but engineers want to know whether the problem will restrict some future science operations.

Crunch time: Next Mars lander enters final year before launch

March 4, 2015 Stephen Clark

Wednesday marked one year until the launch of a NASA seismic station to Mars, and scientists believe they have found a suitable operating post for the lander as engineers race to keep the mission on schedule for liftoff in a narrow 26-day window next March.

NASA eyes ion engines for Mars orbiter launching in 2022

March 3, 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA officials want the agency’s next Mars orbiter to pull double duty as a communications relay station for a fleet of surface landers and as a trailblazer for a future round-trip sample return mission and human expeditions to the red planet.

Aging Mars rover could be shut down

February 3, 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, working well past their expected lifetimes, could be shut down in fiscal year 2016 as the agency tries to balance funding for older missions and development of modernized new space probes.