The layered geologic past of Mars is revealed in stunning detail in new color images returned by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, which is currently exploring the "Murray Buttes" region of lower Mount Sharp. The new images arguably ...
Space Exploration
Sep 10, 2016
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Modern-day Mars may be more hospitable to oxygen-breathing life than previously thought.
Space Exploration
Oct 22, 2018
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NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recently set a record for the steepest terrain it's ever climbed, cresting the "Greenheugh Pediment," a broad sheet of rock that sits atop a hill. And before doing that, the rover took a selfie, ...
Space Exploration
Mar 21, 2020
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3675
For the past year, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has been traveling through a transition zone from a clay-rich region to one filled with a salty mineral called sulfate. While the science team targeted the clay-rich region and ...
Planetary Sciences
Jun 22, 2022
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637
A routine check of the aluminum wheels on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has found two small breaks on the rover's left middle wheel—the latest sign of wear and tear as the rover continues its journey, now approaching the ...
Space Exploration
Mar 22, 2017
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(Phys.org)—NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory's ...
Space Exploration
Dec 16, 2014
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With the launch period of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover opening in 14 weeks, final preparations of the spacecraft continue at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the past week, the assembly, test and launch operations ...
Space Exploration
Apr 10, 2020
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3431
An international team of researchers analyzing the sounds captured by the Perseverance rover has determined the speed of sound on Mars. Baptiste Chide, with Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a presentation at this year's ...
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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Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have received the first status report from the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which landed Feb. 18, 2021, at Jezero Crater attached to the belly of ...
Space Exploration
Feb 21, 2021
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9066
A Mars rover is a spacecraft which propels itself across the surface of Mars after landing.
Rovers have several advantages over stationary landers: they examine more territory, they can be directed to interesting features, they can place themselves in sunny positions to weather winter months and they can advance the knowledge of how to perform very remote robotic vehicle control.
Their advantages over orbiting spacecraft are that they can make observations to a microscopic level and can conduct physical experimentation. Disadvantages of rovers compared to orbiters are the higher chance of failure, due to landing and other risks, and that they are limited to a small area around a landing site which itself is only approximately anticipated.
There have been three successful Mars rovers, all of which were robotically operated. (There have also been two successful non-Martian robotic rovers: in the 1970s the USSR sent two Lunokhod rovers to the Moon.)
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
