Latest Mars rover Stories

Hopes for reviving NASA's Spirit Mars rover dimmed further with passage of the point at which the rover's locale received its maximum sunshine for the Martian year.The rover team has tried to contact Spirit for months with strategies based on the possibility that increasing energy availability might wake the rover from hibernation. The team has now switched to communication strategies designed to address more than one problem on the rover. If no signal is heard from Spirit in the next month...

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has nearly completed its three-month examination of a crater informally named "Santa Maria," but before the rover resumes its overland trek, an orbiting camera has provided a color image of Opportunity beside Santa Maria.The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired the image on March 1, while Opportunity was extending its robotic arm to take close-up photos of a rock called...

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, will carry a next generation, onboard "chemical element reader" to measure the chemical ingredients in Martian rocks and soil. The instrument is one of 10 that will help the rover in its upcoming mission to determine the past and present habitability of a specific area on the Red Planet. Launch is scheduled between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011, with landing in August 2012.The Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument, designed...

NASA's next-generation Mars rover is now expected to command a price tag of $2.5 billion. NASA, which has delayed the launch of its next-generation Mars rover by more than two years, said it has burned through its reserves for the project and needs an extra $82 million to complete testing before launch. It's the latest cost setback to plague the Mars Science Laboratory -- a nuclear-powered rover the size of a small SUV which will be used to study whether the planet had or still does have life...

The team operating NASA's Mars rover Opportunity will temporarily suspend commanding for 16 days after the rover's seventh anniversary next week, but the rover will stay busy.For the fourth time since Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time (Jan. 24, Pacific Time), the planets' orbits will put Mars almost directly behind the sun from Earth's perspective.During the days surrounding such an alignment, called a solar conjunction, the sun can disrupt radio transmissions...

Nine months after last hearing from the Mars rover Spirit, NASA is stepping up efforts to regain communications with the rover before spring ends on southern Mars in mid-March.Spirit landed on Mars Jan. 4, 2004 (Universal Time; Jan. 3, Pacific Time) for a mission designed to last for three months. After accomplishing its prime-mission goals, Spirit worked for more than five years in bonus-time extended missions."The amount of solar energy available for Spirit is still increasing every...

NASA's Mars rover Spirit has had its odometer stuck on 4.8 miles for more than 18 months and has not transmitted any data or signals since March 2010. The Associated Press (AP) reports that Monday marks the rover's seventh year on the red planet and NASA doesn't know if Spirit is dead or alive, but is continuing to listen for any peep as the rover remains trapped in a sand trap. "There's a realistic possibility that Spirit may never wake up again," Dave Lavery, Mars rover program executive at...

On Dec. 16, 2010, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reached a crater about the size of a football field-some 90 meters (295 feet) in diameter. The rover team plans to use cameras and spectrometers during the next several weeks to examine rocks exposed at the crater, informally named "Santa Maria."A mosaic of image frames taken by Opportunity's navigation camera on Dec. 16 shows the crater's sharp rim and rocks ejected from the impact that had excavated the crater.Opportunity...

A rock-zapping laser instrument on NASA's next Mars rover has roots in a demonstration that Roger Wiens saw 13 years ago in a colleague's room at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.The Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on the rover Curiosity can hit rocks with a laser powerful enough to excite a pinhead-size spot into a glowing, ionized gas. ChemCam then observes the flash through a telescope and analyzes the spectrum of light to identify the chemical elements in the...

More than one million people watched assembly and testing of NASA's next Mars rover via a live webcam since it went on-line in October.NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, also known as the Curiosity rover, is being tested and assembled in a clean room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. The webcam, affectionately dubbed "Curiosity Cam" shows engineers and technicians clad in head-to-toe white smocks working on the rover.Metrics from the webcam's hosting...