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Explanation: You've just landed on Mars and opened your eyes -- what do you see? If you're the Curiosity rover, you see a strange gravelly place with a large mountain in the distance. You've landed on target near the edge of 150-km wide Gale Crater, with Mount Sharp on the horizon being the rise in the crater's center. As a car-sized rover with six wheels and a laser, you prepare yourself to go on a two-year mission of exploration, climbing Mt. Sharp, and looking for signs that Mars once harbored life. Currently you sit motionless, check yourself over, and receive...

In a statement issued by the White House in the early morning hours Monday, President Obama congratulated NASA for the successful landing of the rover Curiosity on Mars. "Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history," he said in the statement. "The successful landing of Curiosity - the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet - marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future. It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and...

NASA’s most ambitious Mars probe is set to land late today (or early tomorrow, depending where you live). NASA is one of the few government programs that actually invests in a major — and important — industry that supports high-tech jobs and science and technology advancement. However, the geniuses in Washington has been throwing NASA under the bus as of late. They’d rather bailout unsuccessful ventures. But I digress. At least NASA is finally relying more on the commercialization of space.

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...

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...

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...

NASA engineers are scratching their heads over some unexpected behavior from the long-lived Spirit rover, which began its sixth year exploring Mars this month. Spirit failed to report in to engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., last weekend, prompting a series of diagnostic tests this week to hunt the glitch's source. The aging Mars rover did not beam home a record of its weekend activities and, more puzzlingly, apparently failed to even record any of its actions on Sunday, mission managers said. ... By Monday, Spirit's mission controllers decided to tell the rover to find the...

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is making its way into a giant impact crater to learn more about the Red Planet's geologic past. Engineers sent commands to Opportunity to drive into Victoria Crater and received a confirmation signal from the rover. It will be several hours before NASA knows how well the drive went. Opportunity is expected to drive all six wheels into the crater and back out before making the full plunge several days from now. The drive comes two months after a massive Martian dust bowl kept Opportunity and its twin Spirit hunkered down to conserve energy.

LOS ANGELES - NASA's aging but durable Mars rover Opportunity will make what could be a trip of no return into a deep impact crater as it tries to peer further back than ever into the Red Planet's geologic history. The descent into Victoria Crater received the go-ahead because the potential scientific returns are worth the risk that the solar-powered, six-wheel rover might not be able to climb out, NASA officials and scientists said Thursday. The vehicle has been roaming Mars for nearly 3 1/2 Earth years. Scientists and engineers want to send it in while it still appears healthy....

Those "never say die" robots on Mars-- NASA's Spirit and Opportunity--continue to chalk up science at their respective exploration sites. Looming large for the Opportunity rover at Meridiani Planum is Victoria Crater--a grand bit of territory that's roughly half a mile (800 meters) in diameter. That's about six times wider than Endurance Crater, a feature that the rover previously surveyed for several months in 2004, gathering data on rock layers there that were affected by water of long, long ago. "We are closing in ... we've got only about a kilometer to go now," said Steve Squyres, lead scientist at...

NASA's Spirit Mars rover has arrived at a site dubbed "Home Plate" within Gusev crater. But what the robot found has left scientists puzzled. As the Mars machinery relays images of the area, the sightseeing has sparked healthy debate within the team running the mission. "Well, so far it has been great," said Steve Squyres, lead Mars Rover Exploration scientist at Cornell University. "It's the most spectacular layered rock we've ever seen at Gusev," he told SPACE.com. The images relayed so far by Spirit of Home Plate "really are stunning," Squyres added. "Many of us were pretty much reduced to...

LOS ANGELES - Spirit, the mountaineering rover that successfully scaled a Martian hill this summer, is searching for flatter ground. After two months at the summit of Husband Hill, the six-wheeled rover is making its descent toward a basin to the south where it will explore an outcrop dubbed "home plate" that looks like a baseball diamond from orbit. The solar-powered Spirit's yearlong climb to the peak marked a major feat for the rover, which along with its twin, Opportunity, landed on opposite ends of the Red Planet in 2004 in search of evidence of the past history of water...

At its Gusev crater exploration site, the Spirit Mars rover is wheeling to the summit of Husband Hill and likely to complete its climb this week. "I think we’re going to make it," said the Mars Exploration Rover program’s lead scientist, Steve Squyres of Cornell University. New imagery from the robot shows a feature that is either the summit or something very close to it, he noted in a newly issued rover update on a Cornell University-based website. Spirit has wrapped up work in what’s called the Voltaire region, including a thorough sweep of a rock called "Assemblee" using science...

DENVER, COLORADO -- Those twin robots hard at work on Mars have transmitted teasing views that reinforce the prospect that microbial life may exist on the red planet. Results from NASAs Spirit and Opportunity rovers are being looked over by a legion of planetary experts, including a scientist who remains steadfast that his experiment in 1976 proved the presence of active microbial life in the topsoil of Mars. "All factors necessary to constitute a habitat for life as we know it exist on current-day Mars," explained Gilbert Levin, executive officer for science at Spherix Incorporated of Beltsville, Maryland. Levin made...

An independent candidate who hopes to unseat U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston contends that she is ineligible for the November election.In a lawsuit filed this week, Houston businessman Tom Bazan alleges that Jackson Lee did not file in time for the March 9 Democratic primary and thus is not eligible for the Nov. 2 general election.Jackson Lee, who represents the 18th Congressional District, denied missing the deadline."I physically went over there (to file)," she said Friday. "I take filing very seriously; I do it myself. There's absolutely no question that it was timely."Jackson Lee's primary election application is...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - NASA said Tuesday it has beamed new software to its twin Mars rovers that should allow the six-wheeled vehicles to travel farther, sleep better and avoid the type of computer glitches that temporarily paralyzed one of them. The software update should make the rest of the mission undertaken by Spirit and Opportunity safer and more productive, NASA said. NASA sent the $820 million pair of rovers to Mars to prospect for evidence that the now-frozen planet once had water. Both have found such evidence. The space agency recently extended the mission through September. The new software,...

<p>PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - NASA's Spirit rover discovered more evidence of past water activity on Mars, although not in as great amounts as the twin rover Opportunity found on the other side of the planet, mission scientists said Thursday.</p> <p>The findings come from analysis of a rock dubbed Mazatzal in the Gusev Crater region where Spirit landed on Jan. 3. Since then Spirit has been overshadowed by Opportunity as it found signs that extensive water, possibly a salty sea, once covered its landing site on Meridiani Planum.</p>

We need NASA's investigation skills in D.C., not just on Mars. Here's why: Last week NASA had their second major announcement of discoveries from the two Mars Rovers. The major news services carried the headline that NASA scientists had discovered not only that there had been water on the Red Planet, but that it once had at least one ocean. It was a salty body of water that eventually evaporated, but could have supported life at one time, like similar bodies of water on Earth. As a former physicist, I was interested not just in the conclusion but in HOW...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA (news - web sites)'s Mars rover Opportunity is sending data back to Earth from an ancient martian seashore, scientists reported on Tuesday. "We think Opportunity is now parked on what was once the shoreline of a salty sea on Mars," said Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the science payload on Opportunity and its twin Mars exploration Rover, Spirit. On March 2, astronomers announced that the Red Planet was "drenched with water" at some point. But the rovers' analysis of Mars rocks has now produced the first concrete evidence that liquid water might actually have flowed on...

The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit acquired this navigation camera image on the 72nd martian day, or sol, of its mission (March 15, 2004), after digging its wheel into the drift dubbed "Serpent." Creating the commands that would generate this "scar" was not an easy task for rover controllers. Essentially, they had to choreograph an intricate dance for Spirit, maneuvering it up the side of the dune, shimmying its left front wheel a number of times to create the scuff, and then reversing to attain proper positioning for miniature thermal emission spectrometer observations. Before the task was finished, Spirit moved forward...