Mars isn’t a planet well-known for its natural satellites but it actually does have two small moons. The larger, Phobos, is an irregularly-shaped, heavily grooved and cratered world only about 17 miles (27 km) across at its widest. It orbits Mars so closely that it completes 3 orbits every day, and isn’t even visible from…
Category: Mars
A Red Cent on a Red Planet: Curiosity’s 1909 Lincoln Penny
On March 9, 2017, NASA’s Curiosity rover took this picture with its turret-mounted MAHLI camera of the calibration target installed near the “shoulder” of its robotic arm. In addition to color chips and a metric line graph, the target also includes a U.S. coin: a 1909 Lincoln penny, adhered heads-up. Curiosity’s coin isn’t just for good luck…
A Look Back at Sojourner, the First Rover on Mars
The first mission to successfully* send a rover to Mars, NASA’s Mars Pathfinder, launched on Dec. 4, 1996. It was a “budget” Discovery mission designed to demonstrate a low-cost method for delivering a set of science instruments to Mars and sent the first remote-controlled vehicle to be used on another planet. Solar-powered and only a foot in height,…
Curiosity’s Tracks Are Gone With The Wind
Mars may have an atmosphere just 1% the density of Earth’s but it can still stir up enough of a breeze to quickly cover a rover’s tracks, as evidenced in the animation above. Captured by Curiosity’s downward-looking Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) camera on Jan. 23 and 24, 2017, the two pictures show an approximately 3-foot-wide…
HiRISE Eyes Fresh Craters on Mars
Just to remind you that things are still indeed going “boom” in our Solar System, here is a cluster of fresh craters on Mars created by an impact that occurred sometime between 2008 and 2014. The craters are a result of a meteorite that broke apart during entry, striking the surface as fragments within a localized area….
What Warmed Mars? The Curious Case of the Missing Carbonate
Everything we’ve observed so far about the surface of Mars points to an ancient past that was warmer, wetter, and very possibly habitable for life as we know it. From the scars of enormous floods and vast branching river deltas that are etched into the Martian surface to the rounded pebbles of ancient stream beds…
Opportunity Enters Its “Teenage” Years on Mars
Today marks the start of the “teen years” on Mars for NASA’s Opportunity rover — it’s been busy exploring, studying, and traveling across the planet’s surface for 13 years now and still going strong! Launched July 7, 2003, the rover is currently in its 4,624th sol of operations — pretty impressive for a mission that was initially only planned to…
This is Jupiter Seen from Mars
The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is specifically designed to take super high-resolution images of the surface of Mars but it also does a pretty darn good job capturing pictures of other objects too—like Jupiter and its Galilean moons, several hundred million miles away! The image above was captured in expanded color (that is,…
This is Earth and the Moon Seen From Mars
Here’s a view of our home planet and its lovely Moon captured from 127 million miles away by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on November 20, 2016. The sunlit part of Earth shows eastern Asia, the Indian Ocean, and Australia with ice-covered Antarctica visible as a bright white spot. The Moon has been brightened in this image, since it would…
NASA Releases Mars Rover Game for Curiosity’s 4th Anniversary
Friday, August 5 marks the 4th anniversary of Curiosity’s landing on Mars and to celebrate NASA has released a video game that lets you rack up high scores while trying to drive a rover on Mars (warning: it’s trickier than it looks!)
Opportunity Marks 12 Years of Roving Mars
NASA’s Curiosity rover may be getting all the attention on Mars these days but the real overachiever is Opportunity — it’s been busy exploring, studying, and traveling across the planet’s surface for over 12 years now and still going strong! Launched July 7, 2003, the rover is currently in its 4,270th sol — 4,180 past…
A Craterful of Cracks
Here’s a view of a section of a crater on Mars filled with a lacework of bright spidery fractures, acquired on Sept. 20, 2015 with the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The crater is approximately 3 miles (5 km) wide and located in Mars’ north polar region, and its old, infilled interior has undergone countless millennia…
