China's Mars rover drove from its landing platform and began exploring the surface on Saturday, state-run Xinhua news agency said, making the country only the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet.
Space Exploration
May 22, 2021
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NASA's newest rover recorded audio of itself crunching over the surface of the Red Planet, adding a whole new dimension to Mars exploration.
Space Exploration
Mar 18, 2021
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(Phys.org)—Observations by NASA's Curiosity Rover indicate Mars' Mount Sharp was built by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years.
Space Exploration
Dec 8, 2014
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(Phys.org) —An increasing frequency of computer resets on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has prompted the rover team to make plans to reformat the rover's flash memory.
Space Exploration
Sep 1, 2014
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Using a combination of theory and experiment, researchers have developed a new approach for understanding and predicting how small legged robots – and potentially also animals – move on and interact with complex granular ...
Robotics
Mar 21, 2013
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(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found bright veins of a mineral, apparently gypsum, deposited by water. Analysis of the vein will help improve understanding of the history of wet environments ...
Space Exploration
Dec 8, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- The ground where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became stuck last year holds evidence that water, perhaps as snow melt, trickled into the subsurface fairly recently and on a continuing basis.
Space Exploration
Oct 28, 2010
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Images that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity took at the end of an 81-meter (266-foot) drive on Sept. 16 reveal a dark rock about 31 meters (102 feet) away. The rover's science team has decided to ...
Space Exploration
Sep 22, 2010
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(PhysOrg.com) -- It's amazing what cleaning your glasses can reveal. A mineral-scouting instrument developed at Arizona State University has found an outcrop of rock rich in carbonates in the Columbia Hills of Gusev Crater ...
Space Exploration
Jun 3, 2010
2
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Mars exploration rover Opportunity is allowing scientists to get a glimpse deep inside Mars.
Space Exploration
Jan 21, 2010
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Mission is an ongoing robotic mission of exploring Mars, that began in 2003 with the sending of two rovers — MER-A Spirit and MER-B Opportunity — to explore the Martian surface and geology.
Primary among the mission's scientific objectives is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program which includes three previous successful landers: the two Viking landers in 1976 and Pathfinder in 1997.
The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90 Martian-day primary mission was US$820 million. Since the rovers have continued to function for over five years after landing they have received five mission extensions with the fifth mission extension, which was granted in October 2007, being until the end of 2009. The total cost of the first four mission extensions was $104 million and the fifth mission extension is expected to cost at least $20 million. In July 2007, Martian dust storms blocked sunlight to the rovers and threatened the ability of the craft to gather energy through their solar panels, causing engineers to fear that one or both of them might be permanently disabled. However, the dust storms lifted, allowing them to resume operations.
In recognition of the vast amount of scientific information amassed by both rovers, two asteroids have been named in their honor: 37452 Spirit and 39382 Opportunity.
The mission is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designed, built and is operating the rovers.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
