Latest Opportunity rover Stories

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Building on the success of Curiosity's Red Planet landing, NASA has announced plans for a robust multi-year Mars program, including a new robotic science rover set to launch in 2020. This announcement affirms the agency's commitment to a bold exploration program that meets our nation's scientific and human exploration objectives. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "The Obama administration is committed to...

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The latest work assignment for NASA's long-lived Mars rover Opportunity is a further examination of an area where the robot just completed a walkabout. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "If you are a geologist studying a site like this, one of the first things you do is walk the outcrop, and that's what we've done with Opportunity," said Steve Squyres, the mission's principal investigator at Cornell...

PASADENA, Calif., Dec. 3, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity's arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Detection of the substances...

[ Video 1 ] | Video 2 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA has finally opened up its tightly sealed lips and said that its Curiosity rover has found evidence of simple organic compounds on Mars. NASA announced at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco today that its Mars Curiosity rover has completed its first analysis of Martian soil, finding a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. The space agency said its Curiosity rover has found...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's Mars Express has relayed scientific data from NASA's Curiosity rover for the first time. The data from Curiosity included detailed images of "Rocknest 3" taken by the rover's ChemCam Remote Micro-Imager camera. ChemCam consists of the camera along with a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer, which fires a laser at targets and analyzes the chemical composition of vaporized material. Curiosity...

NASA/JPL Report A Martian dust storm that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been tracking since last week has also produced atmospheric changes detectable by rovers on Mars. Using the orbiter's Mars Color Imager, Bruce Cantor of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, began observing the storm on Nov. 10, and subsequently reported it to the team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The storm came no closer than about 837 miles (1,347 kilometers) from Opportunity,...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online It may not be in the company of little Martians, but NASA's Curiosity is determined to celebrate Thanksgiving this year with, or without, the company of extra-terrestrials. For its Thanksgiving festivities, the rover plans to use its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to examine possible routes and targets to the east. NASA said its priority is to choose a rock for the first use of the rover's hammering drill, which will collect samples of...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online New research published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters shows that water once existed on Mars that was sufficiently warm enough to support life. University of Leicester and The Open University researchers determined that water temperatures on Mars ranged from 122 degrees Fahrenheit to 302 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists found that microbes can live in water with similar temperatures on earth in the volcanic...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online We found out this week that the NASA Mars Odyssey orbiter, launched in 2001, had stopped working. It was no longer sending us vital information from our planned missions to the red planet. We also learned that this was completely intentional. This is because the Odyssey was completing a planned switch-over to a set of redundant equipment that included its main computing system. The transition to equipment that had not been in...

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, already the longest-working spacecraft ever sent to Mars, will switch to some fresh, redundant equipment next week that has not been used since before launch in 2001. Like many spacecraft, this orbiter carries a pair of redundant main computers, so that a backup is available if one fails. Odyssey's "A-side" computer and "B-side" computer each have several other redundant subsystems linked to just that computer. The Odyssey team...