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NASA is giving us daily weather reports from Mars
NASA says its new Mars weather website will be "geeky fun for meteorologists." For the rest of us, it's a daily reminder that Mars is ridiculously cold. The website shares a daily weather report with temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind speed collected by InSight lander, the NASA spacecraft currently stationed near the red planet's equator.
NASA backs tiny 3D-printed sensors for planetary rovers
Nanomaterials might just prove the key to the next wave of planetary rovers. NASA has poured $2 million into a Goddard Space Flight Center team developing 3D-printed sensors whose nanomaterials make them tiny, ultra-sensitive and resistant to radiation. The aim is to build a device that can detect minuscule (on the parts-per-billion-level) amounts of life-supporting chemicals like ammonia, hydrogen, methane and water.
NASA admits the Mars Opportunity rover is dead
If you're a fan of Mars exploration, you're probably in mourning right now. NASA's Opportunity rover has effectively been declared dead after the agency's last attempt to contact the storm-struck rover was met with silence. Officials held a press conference at 2PM ET to discuss the outcome, and as expected NASA confirmed that it is saying goodbye to Opportunity. The machine doesn't stand a chance if it doesn't have power -- Martian winter is coming, and Opportunity needs working heaters to survive the chilly conditions.
NASA puts a key satellite in place for its Mars 2020 mission
NASA is preparing for the Mars 2020 mission by bringing the MAVEN probe, which will act as its antenna and connection to Earth, closer to the red planet. Over the next few months, the spacecraft will fly closer and closer to Mars until it's only 2,800 miles above the surface, down 1,050 miles from its current orbit. That will boost the probe's communications capabilities: As MAVEN principal investigator Bruce Jakosky explained, "It's like using your cell phone. The closer you are to a cell tower, the stronger your signal."
Mars Express orbiter snaps stunning image of Korolev crater
The European Space Agency has released a gorgeous composite image of Mars' Korolev crater, an 82-kilometer-wide crater situated in the planet's northern lowlands. The ESA's Mars Express orbiter snapped pictures of the crater over the course of five orbits, and five "strips" were combined to make this stunning image. The Korolev crater is filled with 1.8-kilometer-thick ice year round, which is believed to be maintained by an occurrence known as a "cold trap." The air moving across the crater's ice cools down, sinks and then acts as a sort of shield over the ice, keeping it cold and frozen all year long.
NASA's InSight lander is ready to monitor marsquakes
On December 19th, Mars InSight lander's ground team moved the vehicle's arm as far as it could reach and planted its seismometer 5.367 feet away. Seeing as the lander's main goal is to gather data so we can learn more about the red planet's interior, the team considers that seismometer its most important instrument. The mission's Principal Investigator, Bruce Banerdt, said seismometer deployment is as significant as landing InSight on Mars. "We need it in order to complete about three-quarters of our science objectives," he explained.
NASA's InSight lander proves it's on Mars with a selfie
Next time you can't find the perfect angle for your selfie, just thank the universe you're not NASA's InSight lander. The spacecraft had to take 11 images with a camera attached to its robotic arm and then stitch them together to create its first self-portrait. InSight clearly took a cue from the Curiosity rover, which has years of experience taking composite selfies with the Martian landscape as its background. You can clearly see InSight's solar panels on full display in the photo, which was captured on December 6th, along with some of its science instruments.
Hear the wind on Mars for the first time, thanks to the InSight lander
Since landing on Mars last week, NASA's InSight lander has been taking pictures of itself and its surroundings as it prepares to unload the scientific instruments it brought along to the planet. But the lander has also picked up something that other Mars missions never have -- audio of the planet's winds. "Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat," Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator, said in a statement. "But one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves."
NASA’s InSight lander is ready to get to work
NASA's InSight lander arrived on Mars last week and now it's prepping for the next stage of its mission. The lander is equipped with a nearly six-foot-long arm, which will be used to lift sensitive scientific instruments off of the lander and place them on the Martian surface -- the first time a robot has been used to do so on another planet. Thus, the arm plays a really key role in this next step of the InSight mission, as placement will be crucial for the mission's overall success. But new images from InSight show the lander is up for the challenge, as the arm is working and has already started to collect images of its surroundings, information that scientists will use to determine where InSight's instruments should be placed.
NASA reveals companies that will help it return to the moon
Last year, President Trump signed a directive that tasked NASA with returning to the moon -- an effort that Vice President Pence and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine have repeatedly backed. And that goal is set to include commercial companies, which will partner with NASA on moon missions and beyond. "Working with US companies is the next step to achieving long-term scientific study and human exploration of the moon and Mars," the agency has said, and today, Bridenstine announced which companies NASA plans to partner with as it works towards a return to the moon.
NASA's InSight lander delivers its first clear photo from Mars
Earlier today the InSight lander successfully touched down on Mars, and it's already crushing the 'gram. Signals indicating that its solar panels had opened and were generating power came back to Earth at about 8:30 PM ET, along with a few photographs relayed via another visitor to Mars: the Odyssey orbiter. While it's expected to take two to three months to fully deploy the lander's instruments, this image came from its Instrument Deployment Camera which is mounted on a robotic arm.
NASA’s InSight lander has arrived on Mars
NASA's InSight lander has touched down on Mars, completing its over six-month journey to the planet. InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, landed on Mars just before 3PM Eastern after a successful entry, deceleration and parachute deployment. The lander will soon get to work -- assuming its solar panels deploy correctly -- and will, for the first time, give us a look at the interior of our planetary neighbor.
Elon Musk says there's a '70 percent' chance he'll move to Mars
Elon Musk has talked about personally heading to Mars before, but how likely is he to make the trip, really? Well, he just put a number on it. In an interview for the Axios on HBO documentary series, Musk said there was a "70 percent" chance he'll go to Mars. There have been a "recent number of breakthroughs" that have made it possible, he said. And as he hinted before, it'd likely be a one-way trip -- he expects to "move there."
Watch NASA's InSight land on Mars tomorrow starting at 2PM ET
After a months-long journey, NASA's InSight lander is poised to touch down on Mars -- and you'd better believe NASA is offering plenty of ways to tune in. It's delivering live coverage of the landing on November 26th starting at 2PM Eastern (the actual landing starts at roughly 2:40PM) across virtually all its video channels. Suffice it to say you have many more options than when Curiosity reached Martian soil in 2012. In addition to the standard avenues, you can watch a commentary-free JPL feed, a Twitch stream and even 360-degree video on avenues like YouTube (same link as the JPL feed) and Facebook.
Orbiter flaw may have ruled out some signs of water on Mars
You might not want to get too excited about the prospects of finding water on Mars. A recently published study has determined that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's approach to handling water data is flawed, potentially invalidating some earlier discoveries of salty water flows. The machine's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) can be confused by some high-contrast areas, and the software used to correct that data can inadvertently produce false signs of perchlorates that hint at salt water flows. There appeared to be an abundance of perchlorates in the corrected results, but there doesn't appear to have been any in the raw data.
NASA selects a landing site for its Mars 2020 rover
NASA has announced where its next Mars rover will be heading. The agency has chosen Jezero Crater from dozens of potential candidates in part for its potential to have preserved signs of past microbial life. "The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "Getting samples from this unique area will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life."
Our moon is the hottest property in the solar system right now
The space race is heating up again in ways we haven't seen since the end of the Cold War. We haven't been to the moon since 1972 but a number of private companies and national agencies have begun looking to our nearest celestial neighbor with renewed interest, not only as a site of scientific study but also as a fuel resource and potential staging area for trips further out into the solar system.
Mars may have enough oxygen underneath its surface for life
The possibility of life on Mars has been a tantalizing possibility for years, and recent discoveries have only increased excitement about whether we'll find life on the red planet. Now, a new study in Nature Geoscience posits that it's possible that Mars may have enough oxygen to harbor life under its surface.
NASA activated Curiosity's second 'brain' after it misbehaved
Tired? Sluggish? Wouldn't it be great if you could just switch your brain to a better functioning version? Well, that's a privilege you can enjoy if you're the Mars Curiosity rover. NASA's intrepid explorer has been subject to a few technical problems over the last two weeks, which means it's been struggling to send its data back to Earth, so engineers have decided to activate Curiosity's second brain.
Deep space travel could destroy astronauts' guts
We can't send astronauts on deep space missions without knowing how the journey will affect the human body -- what's the point of sending them to Mars if they won't even make it to their destinations? That's why researchers have been looking into the effects of deep space travel on human spacefarers. A group of investigators at Georgetown University Medical Center, for instance, has recently discovered that when gastrointestinal tissues are bombarded by galactic cosmic radiation (GCR), their functions get altered. And if the way they function changes, astronauts could develop cancerous tumors in the stomach and colon.