Mars Lives.

[BridgeTroll]

Watch this time lapse from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)

Full article...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/04/flowing-water-mars_n_918860.html

[JeffreyS]

Mars Rover Opportunity Sends Snapshots of Endeavor Crater.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/201589/20110822/mars-rover-opportunity-crater-endeavor-odyssey-spirit-water-impact-craters-nasa.htm

[BridgeTroll]

Ya beat me to it Jeffrey... Opportunity arrived at Endeavor last week and I neglected to update...

[JeffreyS]

I was actually waiting for you to post an update when I saw this one.

[JeffreyS]

I hope we are posting updates five years from now.

[BridgeTroll]

They are currently planning and building the next rovers as we speak.  The next generation will not be reliant on solar power.  Solar power and battery life is one of the limitations of our current set of rovers.

Five years from now we will be watching the new rovers...

[Dog Walker]

And they will be put there by the Chinese if we can't get substantial improvement in our tax revenues soon.

[BridgeTroll]

The new rovers name is... Curiosity.  It will launch sometime between Nov 25 and Dec 18 this year.  It will arrive on Mars Around 25 August 2012.



http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20110831.html

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project continues to press ahead with launch preparation activities, planning to use additional time before encapsulating the rover in the launch vehicle's nose cone.

Officials want to maintain additional schedule margin for enhanced safety procedures in assembly and testing. System testing put the rover and other parts of the spacecraft through simulations of many activities from launch through operations on Mars' surface. Aspects of the test simulating the final moments before landing took longer than scheduled. Additional margin that had been built into the schedule has been consumed in recent weeks by stepped-up safety procedures in assembly and testing.

Based on this, the rover development team will turn over the spacecraft for encapsulation four days later in October than originally scheduled. The project expects to know in approximately two weeks if launch timelines may need to be adjusted. The mission's launch period begins Nov. 25 and runs through Dec. 18.

"We consumed some of the slack in our schedule during system testing in August, and we want to restore the slack to give the assembly, test and launch operations team time to do its job," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Pete Theisinger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The Mars Science Laboratory will deliver Curiosity to an August 2012 landing beside a mountain inside Gale crater on Mars. During a two-year mission on the Red Planet, the rover will investigate whether a selected area of Mars has offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life and for preserving evidence about life.

The spacecraft's back shell, heat shield and cruise stage were delivered to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., in May. The rover and descent stage were delivered in June.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. United Launch Alliance, Denver, is supplying the launch vehicle and launch services. Launch management for the mission is the responsibility of NASA's Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center.

More information about the Mars Science Laboratory is available online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and at http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .

Link to video trailer...

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=105929071

[BridgeTroll]

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/27/local/la-me-adv-mars-launch-20111127

NASA launches largest-ever Mars rover

The one-ton, car-size Curiosity rocketed from Kennedy Space Center on Saturday. The vehicle is on a mission to determine whether life could have existed on Mars.

November 27, 2011|By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles TimesReporting from Cape Canaveral, Fla. â€"

With the roar of an Atlas 5 engine, NASA on Saturday began its boldest venture yet to another planet â€" sending the Mars Science Laboratory on an eight-month journey expected to provide more detailed information about whether the Red Planet is, or ever has been, hospitable to life.

After a one-day delay to replace a faulty battery, the launch went off flawlessly at 7:02 a.m. PST, the rocket rising on a column of white smoke into a blue sky mottled with puffy cumulus clouds.

"Whew! That felt so good," said Joy Crisp, a deputy project scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, as the rocket trailed out of sight. "That was spectacular!"

Its payload was the rover Curiosity, the largest and most sophisticated in a series of robotic vehicles that NASA has sent to Mars. Built at JPL, Curiosity is a six-wheeled, one-ton vehicle the size of a compact car that is bristling with an array of sophisticated scientific gadgets.

Its mission, NASA officials have stressed, is not to find life on Mars, but to find out whether life ever could have existed there in the form of microbes, tiny organisms that are abundant on Earth. It also will try to find further evidence to suggest whether astronauts could survive on Mars, part of NASA's long-term plan to send a manned mission there.

"I like to say it's extraterrestrial real estate appraisal," Pan Conrad, a NASA astrobiologist, said at a pre-launch briefing earlier in the week.

Some 43 minutes after launch, a second stage rocket fell away, leaving the science lab capsule on its own. Control of the spaceship then shifted from the Kennedy Space Center to JPL, which will run the mission for its duration, expected to be a minimum of two years.

A group of JPL scientists and engineers at Kennedy burst into applause when the capsule separated from the rocket. Like most people associated with the mission, they were excited and relieved by the successful launch. Many have worked on the Mars Science Laboratory for nearly a decade and had to endure a two-year delay when the project missed its original launch date.

Pete Theisinger, the project manager at JPL, couldn't stop grinning when he got up to speak at a news conference after the launch. "Our spacecraft is in excellent health and it's on its way to Mars," he said. "Any questions?"

The lab faces a journey of 354 million miles. (Although Mars is less than half that distance from Earth, the fact that it is a moving target makes the trip longer.) It is due to land in spectacular fashion just after 10 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5.

Because of the size of the rover, NASA decided that its previous landing technique, in which vehicles were bounced onto the surface of the planet on air bags, would not work. So Curiosity, after being slowed in its descent by parachutes, will be lowered softly â€" NASA hopes â€" on long bridles using a sky crane technique modeled after those used by helicopters.

Once on the ground, NASA intends for the rover to spend one Martian year, or about two Earth years, exploring an area called Gale Crater, the site of a gently sloped, 3-mile-tall mountain made of sedimentary rock. As with prior missions, there is the likelihood that the rover will keep going after its two-year "warranty" expires.

Scientists hope that as the rover ascends the mountain, the rock will tell the geologic history of the area â€" and ideally suggest whether the planet could have supported life. That would require the presence of three things: water, energy and carbon. The first two have been established as existing on Mars, but previous missions have not allowed scientists to determine whether there is carbon.

"We're basically reading the history of Mars' environmental evolution," John Grotzinger, the project's chief scientist, said at one of the pre-launch briefings. However, he has been at pains to tamp down expectations.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," he said, "and the haystack's as big as a football field."

Scientists believe it is more likely that Curiosity will find other indications of environmental conditions that point toward the possibility that life once existed on Mars, when it was warmer and wetter than it is today.

The researchers said they were excited by the opportunity to deploy some of Curiosity's new technology. One gadget, called a "chem cam," will use a laser to zap rocks, then analyze the resulting sparks with a spectrometer to identify the chemical elements in the material.

Curiosity also has a lab in its belly that will allow it to take soil and rock samples, analyzing their chemistry and mineralogy. And it will deploy an array of cameras to bring back high-definition still photographs and videos to Earth.

Such technology doesn't come cheap, and NASA officials were asked Saturday if they could justify the $2.5 billion being spent on the Mars Science Lab at a time of great need. Grotzinger said the cost, divided among the entire U.S. population, amounted to no more than the cost of a movie ticket per person. (It works out to about $8.)

"I'll leave it to you whether that's a movie you want to see," he said, adding: "This is the stuff that fuels kids' imaginations to go into science and engineering.… I think that's a great investment."

Mars program director Doug McCuistion said the space program also contributes to the economy by creating "high-tech, good-paying" jobs. "We don't spend any money on Mars," he said. "We spend it all here."

The Mars Science Lab is the latest in a series of U.S. missions to the Red Planet, dating to 1964 when Mariner 4 flew by and sent 21 photos back to Earth. More recently, the Pathfinder, Exploration and Opportunity missions landed robotic rovers that transmitted dramatic ground-level photos and other data about Mars â€" considered the most likely planet in our solar system other than Earth to have nurtured life.

By "life," however, scientists stress that they mean the most primitive forms, and don't expect Curiosity to be met by an ambassador.

At the same time, said Steven Benner, a biochemist who heads the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, "we don't want to have a lot of preconceptions. We want to consider that if, you know, Tim Allen's 'Galaxy Quest' alien rock creature comes up and bangs us on the head, we don't want to ignore it. That would be the 'aha!' moment that we would regret having missed. But that's relatively far down in our what-if scenarios."

mitchell.landsberg@latimes.com

[Jason]

Looking forward to the discoveries this rover will find.

[BridgeTroll]

Looking forward to the discoveries this rover will find.

Rover Opportunity is still alive and currently looking for a spot to "winter over".  The rover is of an extreme elderly age... Dust covers the solar panels making electricity generation increasingly difficult.  NASA is looking for a spot where the rover will have a northerly tilt to enable it to gather the diminishing sunlight of the martian winter.  Rover Spirit died last winter after it got stuck and was unable to move to a suitable location...

[Ralph W]

Do you supposed they included windshield wipers on the new model to keep the dust from degrading the function of the solar collectors?

[RiversideLoki]

The new rover is powered by a newly designed MMRTG, a plutonium powered thermal source that will allow the rover to both stay warm and operate during night hours. It will not be affected by the dusty panel problem that has been the issue with the previous rovers.

This rover is significantly larger than the previous rovers, which will allow it to go further and conduct more science.

[BridgeTroll]

We shall see.  Opportunity and Spirit were designed to last 3, Three, months.  Opportunity is now completing its 8th, EIGHTH, YEAR.  We can only hope Curiosity lasts half as long...

[Dog Walker]

Let's just hope that the really complicated landing method works and worry about lifespan later.