Latest Mars Climate Orbiter Stories

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander today accomplished the first and largest of six course corrections planned during the spacecraft's flight from Earth to Mars. Phoenix left Earth Aug. 4, bound for a challenging touchdown on May 25, 2008, at a site farther north than any previous Mars landing. It will robotically dig to underground ice and run laboratory tests assessing whether the site could ever have been hospitable to microbial life. Phoenix today is traveling at about 33,180 meters per second...

LOS ANGELES -- A three-legged NASA spacecraft with a long arm for digging trenches is going to the Martian north pole to study if the environment is favorable for primitive life.But before it can start its work, the Phoenix Mars Lander must survive landing on the surface of the rocky, dusty Red Planet, which has a reputation of swallowing manmade probes. Of the 15 global attempts to land spacecraft on Mars, only five have made it."Mars has the tendency to throw you curve balls,"...

WASHINGTON - After studying Mars four times as long as originally planned, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter appears to have succumbed to battery failure caused by a complex sequence of events involving the onboard computer memory and ground commands. The causes were released today in a preliminary report by an internal review board. The board was formed to look more in-depth into why NASA's Mars Global Surveyor went silent in November 2006 and recommend any processes or procedures that...

By A.J. HostetlerDon't bother asking for a two-by-four from astronauts building the first lunar base. And don't go racing your moon buggy across the Sea of Tranquility at 65 mph. Still smarting from the metric-English mix-up that caused a Mars orbiter to disappear, NASA's ready to go all-metric on the moon. The move will apply only to surface operations for the lunar base NASA wants to build. That means measurements for the robotic rovers, the nuts and bolts on the habitat modules and the...

Every day for the past decade, the U.S. has had a presence at Mars, using spacecraft to understand this extreme world and its potential as a past or present habitat for life. During that time, all spacecraft have become virtually incommunicado for about two weeks every two years. The reason is solar conjunction, which occurs again from October 18-29, 2006. Solar conjunction is the period when Earth and Mars, in their eternal march around the Sun, are obscured from each other by the fiery orb...

Mars is ready for its close-up. The highest-resolution camera ever to orbit Mars is returning low-altitude images to Earth from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Rocks and surface features as small as armchairs are revealed in the first image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter since the spacecraft maneuvered into its final, low-altitude orbital path. The imaging of the red planet at this resolution heralds a new era in Mars exploration. The image of a small fraction of Mars' biggest...

Nearly six months after it entered orbit, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has concluded its aerobraking phase. The spacecraft had been dipping in and out of the Red Planet's atmosphere to adjust its orbit. On August 30, 2006, during its 445th orbit, the spacecraft fired its intermediate thrusters to raise the low point of its orbit and stop dipping into the atmosphere. The six-minute engine burn began at 10:36 a.m. PST, altering the spacecraft's course so that its periapsis (the closest it comes...

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter yesterday began a crucial six-month campaign to gradually shrink its orbit into the best geometry for the mission's science work.Three weeks after successfully entering orbit around Mars, the spacecraft is in a phase called "aerobraking." This process uses friction with the tenuous upper atmosphere to transform a very elongated 35-hour orbit to the nearly circular two-hour orbit needed for the mission's science observations.The orbiter has been...

By Dan Whitcomb PASADENA, California (Reuters) - A $450 million NASA spacecraft achieved orbit around Mars on Friday, successfully completing a make-or-break maneuver in its two-year mission to scour the red planet for evidence of life and landing spots for future astronauts. Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena erupted in loud cheers when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter signaled it had dropped into a perfect orbit around a planet that has defeated most...

By Dan WhitcombPASADENA, California -- A $450 million NASA orbiter designed to circle Mars for two years, searching for signs of life and scouting possible landing spots for future astronauts, neared its dangerous first rendezvous with the red planet on Friday.The unmanned Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is designed to send back 10 times the data of all previous probes put together, but only if it can successfully slip into orbit around the planet -- a feat that has proven notoriously...