NASA’s call to scientists and engineers to help plan a new strategy to explore Mars has resulted in almost double the amount of expected submissions with unique and bold ideas.
Mars Concepts 2012 Conference: Bringing together NASA organizations and the technical and scientific communities in an open forum to advance Mars exploration.
About 400 concepts or abstracts were submitted to … Read the rest of this article
NASA-funded research on Mars meteorites that landed on Earth shows strong evidence that very large molecules containing carbon, which is a key ingredient for the building blocks of life, can originate on the Red Planet. These macromolecules are not of biological origin, but they are indicators that complex carbon chemistry has taken place on Mars.
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This 4.5 billion-year-old rock, labeled …
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has revealed that movement in sand dune fields on the Red Planet occurs on a surprisingly large scale, about the same as in dune fields on Earth.
Back-and-forth blinking of this two-image animation shows movement of a sand dune on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona/JHU-APL. Click here for more information.
This is unexpected … Read the rest of this article
ESA’s Mars Express has returned images of a region on the Red Planet that appears to have been sculpted in part by flowing liquid. This again adds to the growing evidence that Mars had large volumes of water on its surface in the distant past.
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The transition between Acidalia Planitia and Tempe Terra from the Mars Express High-Resolution Stereo Camera …
The latest images released from ESA’s Mars Express reveal a series of ‘pit-chains’ on the flanks of one of the largest volcanoes in the Solar System. Depending on their origin, they might be tempting targets in the search for microbial life on the Red Planet.
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Tractus Catena is shown here in a computer generated perspective view. The image was created …
One particular mountain on Mars, bigger than Colorado’s grandest, has been beckoning would-be explorers since it was first sighted from orbit in the 1970s. Scientists have ideas about how it took shape in the middle of ancient Gale Crater and hopes for what evidence it could yield about whether conditions on Mars have favored life.
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Curiosity, the big rover of …
A proposed Discovery mission concept led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to investigate the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets by studying the deep interior of Mars now has a new name, InSight.
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Artist rendition of the proposed InSight (Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) Lander. InSight is based on the proven Phoenix Mars spacecraft …
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded a scene on Jan. 29, 2012, that includes the first color image from orbit showing the three-petal lander of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit mission. Spirit drove off that lander platform in January 2004 and spent most of its six-year working life in a range of … Read the rest of this article
New images from ESA’s Mars Express show the Syrtis Major region on Mars. Once thought to be a sea of water, the region is now known to be a volcanic province dating back billions of years.
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Syrtis Major, discovered in 1659 by Christaan Huygens, is a volcanic province on Mars. The image is centred on approximately 16°N/73°E. The High-Resolution Stereo …
ESA’s Mars Express has returned strong evidence for an ocean once covering part of Mars. Using radar, it has detected sediments reminiscent of an ocean floor within the boundaries of previously identified, ancient shorelines on Mars.
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New results from the MARSIS radar on Mars Express give strong evidence for a former ocean of Mars. The radar detected sediments reminiscent of …
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