Latest Mini-TES Stories

  Mars rover poised on rock that may yield yet more evidence of a wet Mars Shortly after Labor Day 2011, the Mars rover Opportunity was poised on the rim of the 22,000 meter-wide Endeavour Crater, preparing to sample a novel rock type. Much older than the sedimentary samples the rover’s “tasted” so far, this new sample is flush with the promise of revealing clues to the planet’s environment when running rivers coursed the surface. What was supposed to have been a 90- to...

PASADENA, Calif., June 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Rocks examined by NASA's Spirit Mars Rover hold evidence of a wet, non-acidic ancient environment that may have been favorable for life. Confirming this mineral clue took four years of analysis by several scientists. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) An outcrop that Spirit examined in late 2005 revealed high concentrations of carbonate, which originates in wet, near-neutral conditions, but dissolves in acid....

Rocks examined by NASA's Spirit Mars Rover hold evidence of a wet, non-acidic ancient environment that may have been favorable for life. Confirming this mineral clue took four years of analysis by several scientists.An outcrop that Spirit examined in late 2005 revealed high concentrations of carbonate, which originates in wet, near-neutral conditions, but dissolves in acid. The ancient water indicated by this find was not acidic.NASA's rovers have found other evidence of formerly wet Martian...

A dust storm on Mars has cut into the amount of sunlight reaching the solar array on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, leaving the rover in a vulnerable state.Spirit's solar array produced only 89 watt hours of energy during the rover's 1,725th Martian day, which ended on Nov. 9. This is the lowest output by either Spirit or its twin, Opportunity, in their nearly five years on Mars, and much less energy than Spirit needs each day. The charge level of Spirit's batteries is dropping so low,...

Tempe, Ariz. -- Deposits of nearly pure silica discovered by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in Gusev Crater formed when volcanic steam or hot water (or maybe both) percolated through the ground. Such deposits are found around hydrothermal vents like those in Yellowstone National Park. That's the conclusion of planetary scientists working with data collected by the rover's Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES), developed at Arizona State University.The silica discovery,...

PASADENA, Calif. - Two months after sky-darkening dust from severe storms nearly killed NASA's Mars exploration rovers, the solar powered robots are awake and ready to continue their mission. Opportunity's planned descent into the giant Victoria Crater was delayed, but now the rover is preparing to drive into the 800-meter-diameter crater (half-mile-diameter) as early as Sept. 11. Spirit, Opportunity's rover twin, also survived the global dust storms. The rovers are 43 months into missions...

PASADENA, Calif. - A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water. Members of the rover science team heard from a colleague during a recent teleconference that the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit's arm, had...

Luck, it has been said, favors the well prepared. That explains, perhaps, the fortune of the plucky Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity -- and their creators, including Cornell Professor Steve Squyres, scientific leader of the NASA mission, back on Earth. To say June has been a good month for the Mars Expedition Rover (MER) team is -- well, like saying getting to Mars is a bit of a hike. The mission has been, for the scientists and engineers who expected the rovers to explore the planet for 90...

NASA -- NASA has approved up to 18 more months of operations for Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars rovers that have already surprised engineers and scientists by continuing active exploration for more than 14 months."The rovers have proven their value with major discoveries about ancient watery environments on Mars that might have harbored life," said Dr. Ghassem Asrar, deputy associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "We are extending their mission...

JPL -- NASA has suspended use of one of the mineral-identifying tools on the Opportunity Mars rover while experts troubleshoot a problem with getting data from the instrument, the robot's miniature thermal emission spectrometer. "As always, our first priority is to protect the instrument, so we have turned it off while we plan diagnostic tests," said Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project....