And what details! This image, acquired by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Jan. 24, 2014, shows rippled dunes in Mars’ southern hemisphere, coated with a fall dusting of seasonal carbon dioxide frost. With the Sun just five degrees above the horizon, the surface detail captured by HiRISE is simply exquisite. Be…
Category: Mars
Mars Gets a Brand New Crater
If you count at least slightly over two years old as “brand new” then yes, this one is certainly that! Seen above in an image taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013, a 100-foot-wide (30-meter) crater is surrounded by bright rays of ejected material and blown-clear surface. Since…
The Brightest Lights: 12 Awesome Space Stories of 2013
What a year for space exploration! With 2013 coming to a close I thought I would look back on some of the biggest news in space that I’ve featured here on Lights in the Dark. Rather than a “top ten” list, as is common with these year-end reviews, I’m going to do more of a…
What Happened to Mars?
Mars wasn’t always the cold, dry world that it is today — billions of years ago it likely looked a lot more like Earth, with seas and rivers of liquid water on its surface and a thick atmosphere with air and clouds. But something happened over the course of Mars’ history to transform it from…
Curiosity Gets the Big Scoop on Martian Water
Making a big splash (pun intended) in the space news world today is the report that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity has found traces of water in samples of Martian soil! The samples were scooped from an area nicknamed “Rocknest” in October 2012 and analyzed with the SAM instrument suite (read more on that here.)…
Curiosity will check out these bright outcrops on her way to Mount Sharp
An outcrop visible as light-toned streaks in the lower center of this image has been chosen as a place for NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity to study for a few days in September 2013. The pause for observations at this area, called “Waypoint 1,” is the first during the rover’s trek of many months from the…
Happy 1-Year Anniversary to Curiosity! (Play It Again, SAM!)
Today marks the one (Earth) year anniversary of Curiosity’s landing on Mars, which occurred on at 10:31 p.m PDT August 5 (1:31 p.m. EDT August 6) 2012… hard to believe it’s been a whole year already! But then, with all that the MSL mission has discovered over these past 12 months, it’s also hard to believe…
NASA Announces Goals for Next Mars Rover
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” — that seems to be the idea behind the designs for NASA’s next Mars mission, which will put yet another rover on the Red Planet in 2020. Drawing on the developments from previous rovers — Spirit, Opportunity, and especially Curiosity — the next robotic explorer will feature a…
Want to see a BILLION-pixel view of Mars from Curiosity?
Well, here you go. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’. 😉 Actually this is a NASA-produced image made of 850 frames taken by Curiosity’s MastCam, showing the view from the rover as of late October/early November 2012. Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) rises in the distance, and the mountainous rim of Gale Crater can be…
A Solution to a Slippery Slope: CO2 Sleds on Mars?
Ever since high-resolution images of Mars’ surface have become available, scientists have wondered about the cause of long gullies seen running down along the slopes of ridges and crater walls. Here on Earth such features are often created by water flowing downhill, carving channels as it goes — but on Earth similar features usually end…
Road Trip! Curiosity Prepares for Some Long-Distance Driving
It’s time for Curiosity to get into high gear! NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission is approaching its biggest turning point since landing its rover, Curiosity, inside Mars’ Gale Crater last summer. Curiosity is finishing investigations in an area smaller than a football field where it has been working for six months, and it will soon…
How Far is Mars?
How far away is Mars? The exact answer varies, of course, as both it and our planet are constantly moving along their own orbits around the Sun. At the time of this writing Mars is on the other side of the Sun from us, 2.413 AU away as the space crow flies (which equates to…
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