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The US is scrapping a joint project with the EU to land a robot on Mars due to lack of money. Charles Bolden, the chief of US space agency NASA, announced the move at a press conference in Washington on Monday (13 February) on how his agency plans to spend its 2013 budget. He said: "Tough choices had to be made ... This means we will not be moving forward with the planned 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions that we had been exploring with the European Space Agency (ESA)." He added the US is not giving up on Mars as...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists say NASA is about to propose major cuts in its exploration of other planets, especially Mars. And NASA's former science chief is calling it irrational. With limited money for science and an over-budget new space telescope, the space agency essentially had to make a choice in where it wanted to explore: the neighboring planet or the far-off cosmos. Mars lost. Two scientists who were briefed on the 2013 NASA budget that will be released next week said the space agency is eliminating two proposed joint missions with Europeans to explore Mars in 2016 and 2018. NASA...

In August 1994, I was invited to have dinner with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich. At that time, I was a senior engineer working for Martin Marietta Astronautics in Denver, where I had been responsible for inventing a new plan called “Mars Direct.” By radically simplifying the mission architecture and making bold use of Martian resources starting on the very first mission, this concept offered the potential to reduce the cost and schedule of a human Mars-exploration program. NASA analysis had confirmed these advantages, and word had leaked to Newsweek, which featured it as the cover story of its July...

Explanation: Where on Mars should you spend the winter? As winter approached in the southern hemisphere of Mars last November, the Opportunity rover had just this problem -- it needed a place to go. The reduced amount of sunlight impacting Opportunity's solar panels combined with the extra power needed to keep equipment warm could drain Opportunity's batteries. Therefore Opportunity was instructed to climb onto the 15 degree incline of Greeley's Haven, shown as the rocky slope ahead. The incline increased power input as Opportunity's solar panels now have greater exposure to sunlight, while also giving the rolling robot some interesting...

Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July. This is only the fifth ...

A coordinated global campaign is monitoring a wayward Russian Mars probe that's slated to crash to Earth in the next few days, the European Space Agency has announced. The doomed Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which Russian officials estimate will re-enter Earth's atmosphere between Saturday and Monday, is now officially a target for the 12-member Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, or IADC for short. "An IADC re-entry prediction campaign is ongoing since Jan. 2. Phobos-Grunt was identified to be no high-risk object," said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the space debris office at the European Space Agency's (ESA) European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt,...

A Russian scientific spacecraft whizzing out of control around the Earth, and expected to re-enter the atmosphere on Saturday, may have failed because it was struck by some type of antisatellite weapon, the director of Russia’s space agency said in an interview published Tuesday. He did not say who would want to interfere with the spacecraft, which was intended to explore a moon of Mars. The Russian craft, named Phobos-Grunt for the moon and the Russian word for ground, ran into trouble soon after it was launched in November, when its rockets failed to lift it out of low Earth...

Despite various economic issues undermining efforts by the world’s leading space powers to forge a program for future manned flights to the Red Planet, an international working group has come up with a universal space exploration roadmap. The effort by the partner nations in the International Space Station project, namely Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency, was also supported by China, India, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other countries

A Russian spacecraft bound for a moon of Mars and stuck in Earth's orbit will come crashing back next month, but its toxic fuel and radioactive material on board will pose no danger of contamination, the Russian space agency said Friday. ... The failed mission was the latest in a series of recent Russian launch failures that have raised concerns about the condition of the country's space industries. Officials have blamed the failures on obsolete equipment and an aging workforce.

Explanation: What could create this unusual vein of rock on Mars? A leading hypothesis is that this thin rock layer dubbed "Homestake" was deposited by a running liquid -- like most mineral veins are here on Earth. And the running liquid of choice is water. Therefore, this mineral streak -- rich in calcium and sulfur -- is the latest in the growing body of evidence that part of Mars had a watery past. This, in turn, increases the speculation that Mars was once hospitable to life. Pictured above is a vista taken near the western rim of Endeavour Crater by...

Explanation: Next stop: Mars. This past weekend the Mars Science Laboratory carrying the Curiosity Rover blasted off for the red planet atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, as pictured above. At five times the size of the Opportunity rover currently operating on Mars, Curiosity is like a strange little car with six small wheels, a head-like camera mast, a rock crusher, a long robotic arm, and a plutonium power source. Curiosity is scheduled to land on Mars next August and start a two year mission to explore Gale crater, to help determine whether Mars could ever...

NASA Live Launch Coverage

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory will begin its mission to the Red Planet Saturday, with a launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is scheduled to occur during a one-hour and 43 minute window opening at 15:02 UTC (10:02 local time). [...]

HAMPTON Start with the big numbers - 354 million miles to Mars and a spacecraft weighing 7,000 pounds and traveling at 13,000 mph. Then go to the small numbers - an eight-month journey ending with seven minutes in nail-biting final descent. Put them together and you've got something that NASA Langley's David Way has worked toward for 10 years: the landing on Mars of NASA's newest planetary rover, Curiosity, scheduled to launch Saturday. More than 100 researchers and technicians at NASA Langley Research Center have worked on the mission. "When I started this project, my wife and I had a...

Russian engineers are scrambling to salvage a robotic Mars moon probe that is stuck in orbit around Earth, but are facing an uphill battle to get the spacecraft back on a path to the Red Planet before it becomes just another piece of space junk. The Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft launched Tuesday (Nov. 8) and separated from its Zenit rocket as planned. But the probe's own thrusters failed to fire in a maneuver that would have sent Phobos-Grunt on a trajectory toward Mars, Russian space officials said. Now the spacecraft, which is also carrying China's first Mars orbiter, is trapped in...

Mission to Martian moon is the country's first interplanetary attempt since 1996. Eric Hand 04 November 2011 Main Phobos, as seen in 2008 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Article tools Print Email Rights and Permissions Share/bookmark For the first time in 15 years, Russia is getting back into the business of interplanetary space science. It plans to launch an ambitious mission on 8 November to return a sample of soil from the Martian moon Phobos. The Phobos–Grunt mission (which means Phobos-soil) would welcome Russia back to the elite group of nations — the United States, Japan and...

Six men locked away in steel tubes for a year-and-a-half to simulate a mission to Mars have emerged from isolation.The Mars500 project, undertaken at a Moscow institute, was intended to find out how the human mind and body would cope on a long-duration spaceflight. It is a venture that has fascinated all who have followed it around the globe. The study even saw three of the men carry out a pretend landing on Mars, donning real spacesuits and walking across an enclosed sandy yard.

Explanation: What caused this unusual light rock formation on Mars? Intrigued by the possibility that they could be salt deposits left over as an ancient lakebed dried-up, detailed studies of these fingers now indicate a more mundane possibility: volcanic ash. Studying the exact color of the formation indicated the possible volcanic origin. The light material appears to have eroded away from surrounding area, indicating a very low-density substance. The stark contrast between the rocks and the surrounding sand is compounded by the unusual darkness of the sand. The above picture was taken with the Thermal Emission Imaging System on the...

Word has leaked out that in its new budget, the Obama administration intends to terminate NASA’s planetary exploration program. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, being readied on the pad, will be launched, as will the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter scheduled for 2013, but that will be it. No further missions to anywhere are planned. After 2013, America’s amazing career of planetary exploration, which ran from the Mariner probes in the 1960s through the great Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Pathfinder, MarsGlobalSurveyor, MarsOdyssey, Spirit, Opportunity, MarsReconnaissanceOrbiter, Galileo and Cassini missions, will simply end. Furthermore, the plan from the Office of Management and...

Mars Express was able to accomplish what so many other spacecraft have tried and failed by using a SPICAM(2) spectrometer The search for water on Mars has been ongoing for quite some time now, with Mars rovers like NASA's Spirit and Opportunity being two examples of those who have found clues that point to a once-tropical past on the dusty red planet billions of years ago. Now, the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has discovered that Mars' atmosphere holds water vapor in a supersaturated state. Mars Express was able to accomplish what so many other spacecraft have tried and...

The US company SpaceX is working on the first-ever reusable rocket to launch to space and back, with the goal of one day helping humans colonize Mars, founder Elon Musk said Thursday. The vehicle would be a reusable version of the Falcon 9 rocket which SpaceX used to propel its Dragon space capsule to low Earth-orbit on a test mission last year. Its first cargo trip to the International Space Station is set for January. Currently, a Falcon rocket costs between 50-60 million dollars to build and launch, with fuel and oxygen costs making up just 200,000 dollars. Then, it...

Explanation: Part of Mars is defrosting. Around the South Pole of Mars, toward the end of every Martian summer, the warm weather causes a section of the vast carbon-dioxide ice cap to evaporate. Pits begin to appear and expand where the carbon dioxide dry ice sublimates directly into gas. These ice sheet pits may appear to be lined with gold, but the precise composition of the dust that highlights the pit walls actually remains unknown. The circular depressions toward the image center measure about 60 meters across. The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars-orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the above image...

Explanation: Why does this Martian rock have so much zinc? Roughly the size and shape of a tilted coffee-table, this oddly flat, light-topped rock outcropping was chanced upon a few weeks ago by the robotic Opportunity rover currently rolling across Mars. Early last month Opportunity reached Endeavour crater, the largest surface feature it has ever encountered, and is now exploring Endeavour's rim for clues about how wet Mars was billions of years ago. Pictured above and named Tisdale 2, the unusual rock structure was probed by Opportunity last week and is now thought to be a remnant thrown off during...

Aug. 30, 2011 -- On the slopes of the vast Martian shield volcano Pavonis Mons, a rather odd-looking crater resides. Originally spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Context Camera (CTX) earlier this year, mission managers decided to zoom in on the suspect feature using the awesome power of the MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. Indeed, as HiRISE has confirmed, this is one very odd-looking crater. From a distance, the crater appeared to have a black spot in its center, looking almost like the bulls eye on a dartboard. But on closer scrutiny the spot turned out...

Rising greenhouse emissions may tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report for Nasa It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain. This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by scientists at Nasa and Pennsylvania State...

Extra, extra read all about it (hat tip Andrew Bolt): Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists Rising greenhouse emissions may tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report for Nasa Is it April Fools’ Day, or is someone playing the alien card? The scare report was brought to us by the Guardian’s science correspondent, Ian Sample. One threat – preemptive strikes: The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have...

Explanation: What can the present-day terrain in and around large Endeavor crater tell us about ancient Mars? Starting three years ago, NASA sent a coffee-table sized robot named Opportunity on a mission rolling across the red planet's Meridiani Planum to find out. Last week, it finally arrived. Expansive Endeavor crater stretches 22 kilometers from rim to rim, making it the largest crater ever visited by a Mars Exploration Rover (MER). It is hypothesized that the impact that created the crater exposed ancient rock that possibly formed under wet conditions, and if so, this rock may yield unique clues to the...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (BNO NEWS) -- NASA on Wednesday announced that its Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reached the planet's Endeavour crater to study rocks never seen before. On Monday, the golf cart-sized rover relayed its arrival at a location named Spirit Point on the crater's rim, after a journey of almost three years. Opportunity was able to drive approximately 13 miles (21 kilometers) after climbing out of the Victoria crater, NASA said. Endeavour crater is more than 25 times wider than Victoria crater, being 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. At Endeavour, scientists expect to see much older rocks and...

Explanation: What is causing these dark streaks on Mars? A leading hypothesis is flowing -- but quickly evaporating -- water. The streaks, visible in dark brown near the image center, appear in the Martian spring and summer but fade in the winter months, only to reappear again the next summer. These are not the first markings on Mars that have been interpreted as showing the effects of running water, but they are the first to add the clue of a seasonal dependence. The above picture, taken in May, digitally combines several images from the the HiRISE instrument on the Mars...

Explanation: What has the Opportunity rover found on Mars? While traversing a vast empty plain in 2005 in Meridiani Planum, one of Earth's rolling robots on Mars found a surprise when visiting the location of its own metallic heat shield discarded last year during descent. The surprise is the rock visible on the lower left, found to be made mostly of dense metals iron and nickel. The large cone-shaped object behind it -- and the flank piece on the right -- are parts of Opportunity's jettisoned heat shield. Smaller shield debris is also visible. Scientists do not think that the...

Explanation: This sharp view from the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter is centered on 154 kilometer (96 mile) wide Gale crater, near the martian equator. Within Gale, an impressive layered mountain rises about 5 kilometers (3 miles) above the crater floor. Layers and structures near its base are thought to have been formed in ancient times by water-carried sediments. In fact, a spot near the crater's northern side at the foot of the mountain has now been chosen as the target for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. Scheduled for launch late this year, the mission...

President Obama has categorically ruled out a constitutional challenge to the US debt ceiling since I wrote yesterday’s blog. Spokesman Jay Carney said the White House cannot invoke the 14th Amendment, which stipulates that US federal debt “shall not be questioned”. “It’s not available. The Constitution makes clear that Congress has the authority, not the president, to borrow money and only Congress can increase the statutory debt ceiling. That is just a reality,” he said. Obama had previously been vague about this, saying White House lawyers were “not persuaded that is a winning argument”. It is a revealing turn of...

The US space agency's unmanned Curiosity rover will explore a mountain on Mars that should read like "a great novel," revealing if signs of life ever existed on the red planet, NASA said Friday. The landing site for the 2.5 billion dollar Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) was unveiled the day after the 30-year shuttle era ended with the return to Earth of Atlantis after its final mission to the International Space Station. Clues sent home from Mars are important to NASA as it aims to build a spaceship capable of toting humans there by 2030, while private companies race to...

Planetary scientists have long wondered why Mars is only about half the size and one-tenth the mass of Earth. As next-door neighbors in the inner solar system, probably formed about the same time, why isn't Mars more like Earth and Venus in size and mass? A paper published in the journal Nature this week provides the first cohesive explanation and, by doing so, reveals an unexpected twist in the early lives of Jupiter and Saturn as well. Dr. Kevin Walsh, a research scientist at Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®), led an international team performing simulations of the early solar system, demonstrating...

Robert Zubrin —The Case For Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must Fifteen years ago, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin published The Case for Mars, and issued a clarion call to his fellow scientists, and the people of Earth. We need to plan our Mars colony, and we need to do it now. Today Zubrin has released an updated and revised version of his classic book, outlining the most realistic way to get ourselves to Mars and start setting up a human society there. Smart, idealistic, and pragmatic, this book is more important than ever. And...

, A Martian surface feature, as seen on the Google Mars database, that one man says looks like the profile of Mahatma Gandhi. CREDIT: Matteo Ianneo/ESA/Google Maps/Before It's News View full size image Now that Google Mars, a new online map pieced together from satellite images of the Red Planet, is up and running, space enthusiasts the world over are finding interesting objects on the Martian surface. The latest is a face found by an Italian named Matteo Ianneo, who has also claimed to have found vegetation, entrances to underground tunnels and city ruins on Mars in the past few...

We have all heard of little green men from Mars. But now an American 'armchair astronaut' claims to have discovered a mysterious structure on the surface of the red planet - by looking on Google earth. David Martines, whose YouTube video of the 'station' has racked up over 200,000 hits so far, claims to have randomly uncovered the picture while scanning the surface of the planet one day. Describing the 'structure' as a living quarters with red and blue stripes on it, to the untrained eye it looks nothing more than a white splodge on an otherwise unblemished red landscape....

A GOOGLE geek has found what he believes is a 'space station' on Mars.He found the spec on the Red Planet by accident but has provided fellow explorers with the coordinates of the 'object' so they can discover it for themselves. American armchair astronaut David Martines posted a clip of his trip to the surface of the planet on YouTube. He used the search giant's maps of the astral body and his video has already clocked up a staggering 58,000 views. David explains how he found the 'space station' or possibly 'power station' quite by accident at coordinates 71 49'19.73"N...

[Credit: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, NASA, JPL, Cornell; Image Processing: Kenneth Kremer, Marco Di Lorenzo] Explanation: This is the last thing that the Spirit rover on Mars ever saw. Operating years beyond original expectations, Spirit eventually got mired in martian dirt and then ran out of power when investigating the unusual Home Plate surface feature on Mars. Visible in the above panorama are numerous rocks and slopes of the surrounding Columbia Hills of Mars. The strange hill with the light colored top, visible near the top center of the image, has been dubbed von Braun and was a future destination...

Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, much quicker than scientists previously thought.Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass of Earth. The study supports a 20-year-old theory that Mars remained small because it avoided collisions with planetary building material. The new finding is published in the journal Nature. In our early Solar System, well before planets had formed, a frisbee-shaped cloud of gas and dust encircled the Sun. Scientists believe that the planets grew from material pulled together by electrostatic charges - the...

Last week, long-time Mars advocate Robert Zubrin published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal saying mankind could get to Mars on the cheap within 5 years using SpaceX (News - Alert) hardware -- but was he serious, or just fishing for a debate? Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to drop a trail of bread crumb hints that it's build up infrastructure capable of supporting a long-term commitment to Mars.

Elon Musk, the inspiration behind Iron Man’s executive-turned-rocketeering space hero Tony Stark, believes his space-transport start-up will send passengers to Mars in as soon as 10 years.

Spaceships powered primarily by water could open up the solar system to exploration, making flights to Mars and other far-flung locales far cheaper, a recent study has found. A journey to Mars and back in a water-fueled vehicle could cost as little as one space shuttle launch costs today, researchers said. And the idea is to keep these "space coaches" in orbit between trips, so their relative value would grow over time, as the vehicles reduce the need for expensive one-off missions that launch from Earth. The water-powered space coach is just a concept at the moment, but it could...

Chavez says capitalism may have ended life on Mars Tue, Mar 22 2011 By Eyanir Chinea CARACAS (Reuters) - Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday. "I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day. Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world's problems, warned that water supplies on Earth were drying...

Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday. "I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day. Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world's problems, warned that water supplies on Earth were drying up. "Careful! Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there...

The longest spaceflight simulation in history – a 500-day mission to Mars is reaching its destination, as the astronauts prepare to land on the Red Planet later on Saturday. The crew of three volunteers is scheduled to leave their spaceship, where they have been locked since June, for the first “space walk” on the Martian surface. Fake as it may seem, the ongoing experiment is more than virtual, as it helps prepare future astronauts for a real trip to Mars. The program’s emphasis on realism means that the simulated spacewalk is going to be monitored from Russia’s real-life mission control...

Okay, you FR sky watchers, what is the very bright planet I see each morning as I make my way into the city of Chicago? It is in the SE sky. Just asking and yes, I've checked Uranus...

Russia resumes this year the exploration of far-away space, after the interruption that lasted several years. The launching of the interplanetary automatic space station Phobos-Ground is scheduled for October. It is to bring to the Earth rock samples from Phobos, satellite of Mars. The first live organisms from the Earth – some 60 of them – will be on board the space station. The Phobos-Ground is planned to be launched off Baikonur with the help of the Zenit-2SB carrier rocket within the framework of the Ground Launch international programme. It will take the space station 11 months to reach the...

I apologize if this has been posted...way too many threads to sort through. I appears that he was posting at ATS as Erad3. He started 4 threads there in July, 2 of which were about the Mars Rover missions being a hoax. He is adamant that manned space travel isn't possible and makes numerous comments about the shuttle program. Interesting...since Giffords husband is an astronaut and flew missions and was scheduled for another in April. I wonder if the question Loughner asked her back in 2007 had something to do with this (the year Giffords and Kelly married). This is...

I offer credit to the 400 people who have Volunteered for a One-Way Mission to Mars.