When NASA's Mars rovers found manganese oxides in rocks in the Gale and Endeavor craters on Mars in 2014, the discovery sparked some scientists to suggest that the red planet might have once had more oxygen in its atmosphere ...
Planetary Sciences
Dec 22, 2022
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387
Among our solar system's many moons, Saturn's Titan stands out—it's the only moon with a substantial atmosphere and liquid on the surface. It even has a weather system like Earth's, though it rains methane instead of water. ...
Planetary Sciences
Aug 10, 2021
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1963
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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437
After proving powered, controlled flight is possible on the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter has new orders: scout ahead of the Perseverance rover to assist in its search for past signs of microbial life.
Space Exploration
Apr 30, 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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A NASA rover streaked through the orange Martian sky and landed on the planet Thursday, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars.
Space Exploration
Feb 18, 2021
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701
The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built—a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers—blasted off for the red planet Thursday as part of an ambitious, long-range project to bring ...
Space Exploration
Jul 30, 2020
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3292
A team working with NASA to study data the Mars Curiosity Rover has found high levels of methane at a site on the Red Planet. The existence of methane is, of course, a possible sign of life, since it is produced in abundance ...
Modern-day Mars may be more hospitable to oxygen-breathing life than previously thought.
Space Exploration
Oct 22, 2018
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Engineers working with NASA's Curiosity Mars rover have been hard at work testing a new way for the rover to drill rocks and extract powder from them. This past weekend, that effort produced the first drilled sample on Mars ...
Space Exploration
May 23, 2018
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161
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
