Latest Mars Global Surveyor Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One of the most complicated landings ever performed on Mars will be taking place 354-million-miles away on August 5 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and it will be supported by the European Space Agency's Mars Express. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) will be delivering the newest rover late-night on August 5, after encountering what has been tagged as "seven minutes of terror." The spacecraft will enter the Mars atmosphere...

Engineers have found the root cause of a computer reset that occurred two months ago on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory and have determined how to correct it. The fix involves changing how certain unused data-holding locations, called registers, are configured in the memory management of the type of computer chip used on the spacecraft.  Billions of runs on a test computer with the modified register configuration yielded no repeat of the reset behavior. The mission team made this software...

Mars Science Laboratory Mission Status Report An engine firing on Jan. 11 will be the biggest maneuver that NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft will perform on its flight between Earth and Mars. The action will use a choreographed sequence of firings of eight thruster engines during a period of about 175 minutes beginning at 3 p.m. PST (6 p.m. EST or 2300 Universal Time). It will redirect the spacecraft more precisely toward Mars to land at Gale Crater. The trajectory resulting...

  The European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday that it has discovered a crater on Mars that was once filled by a lake. NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft was first to identify the lake.  ESA said this delta structure is characteristic of the presence of a lake in the crater. The delta is an ancient fan-shaped deposit of dark sediments that is laid down in water, according to the space agency. The extinct lake is in the 40-mile-diameter Eberswalde crater that formed about...

NASA's versatile Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which began orbiting Mars five years ago today, March 10, has radically expanded our knowledge of the Red Planet and is now working overtime.The mission has provided copious information about ancient environments, ice-age-scale climate cycles and present-day changes on Mars.The orbiter observes Mars' surface, subsurface and atmosphere in unprecedented detail. The spacecraft's large solar panels and dish antenna have enabled it to transmit more...

DENVER, Dec. 15, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- A Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT)-built spacecraft, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has worked longer at Mars than any other spacecraft in history. Odyssey entered orbit around Mars on Oct. 24, 2001 and today, the 3,340th day since that arrival, it passed the Martian career longevity record set by its predecessor, Mars Global Surveyor. Lockheed Martin also built and flew the Mars Global Surveyor for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Achieving this...

By the middle of next week, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will have worked longer at Mars than any other spacecraft in history.Odyssey entered orbit around Mars on Oct. 24, 2001. On Dec. 15, the 3,340th day since that arrival, it will pass the Martian career longevity record set by its predecessor, Mars Global Surveyor, which operated in orbit from Sept. 11, 1997, to Nov. 2, 2006.Odyssey made its most famous discovery -- evidence for copious water ice just below the dry surface of Mars --...

The new project manager for the longest-working spacecraft currently active at Mars, NASA's Mars Odyssey, has a long track record himself.He is Gaylon McSmith, a former pilot of U.S. Air Force fighter jets and Continental Airlines airliners. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., he has been a leader on the Odyssey team since two months after the spacecraft began orbiting Mars in October 2001.On Dec. 15 of this year, Odyssey will break the record for the longest-working...

What will the Martian atmosphere be like when the next Mars rover descends through it for landing in August of 2012?An instrument studying the Martian atmosphere from orbit has begun a four-week campaign to characterize daily atmosphere changes, one Mars year before the arrival of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity. A Mars year equals 687 Earth days.The planet's thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide is highly repeatable from year to year at the same time of day and seasonal date during...

Methane in the atmosphere of Mars lasts less than a year, according to a study by Italian scientists. Sergio Fonti (Università del Salento) and Giuseppe Marzo (NASA Ames) have used observations from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft to track the evolution of the gas over three Martian years.  They presented their results at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome on Tuesday September 21st."Only small amounts of methane are present in the Martian atmosphere, coming from very...