[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n just hours, NASA’s InSight spacecraft will enter the atmosphere of Mars after traveling 301,223,981 miles during a seven-month period. If all goes well, the craft will enter the atmosphere, deploy a chute and utilize retro-rockets to touch down on the red planet six minutes before 11 am Alaska time today. NASA’s InSight stands for Interior […]
NASA’s Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet at approximately 3 p.m. EST Nov. 26, and viewers everywhere can watch coverage of the event live on NASA Television, the agency’s website and social media platforms. Launched on May 5, InSight marks NASA’s first […]
Every Mars landing is a knuckle-whitening feat of engineering. But each attempt has its own quirks based on where a spacecraft is going and what kind of science the mission intends to gather. On Nov. 26, NASA will try to safely set a new spacecraft on Mars. InSight is a lander dedicated to studying the […]
The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars in orbit around the red planet. Image-NASA The sharp eye of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured the tiny moon Phobos during its orbital trek around Mars. Because the moon is so small, it appears star-like in the Hubble pictures. Over […]
A new observation from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captures the landing platform that the rover Opportunity left behind in Eagle Crater more than 13 years and 27 miles (or 44 kilometers) ago. A series of bounces and tumbles after initial touchdown plunked the airbag-cushioned lander into the crater, a mere 72 feet (22 meters) […]
Mars may have been a wetter place than previously thought, according to research on simulated Martian meteorites conducted, in part, at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). In a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers found evidence that a mineral found in Martian meteorites—which had been considered as […]
Mars’ largest moon, Phobos, has captured public imagination and been shrouded in mystery for decades. But numerical simulations recently conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have shed some light on the enigmatic satellite. The dominant feature on the surface of Phobos (22-kilomters across) is Stickney crater (9-km across), a mega crater that spans […]
The geologic shape of what were once shorelines through Mars’ northern plains convinces scientists that two large meteorites – hitting the planet millions of years apart – triggered a pair of mega-tsunamis. These gigantic waves forever scarred the Martian landscape and yielded evidence of cold, salty oceans conducive to sustaining life. “About 3.4 billion years […]
Just weeks before the historic encounter of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) with Mars in October 2014, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft entered orbit around the Red Planet. To protect sensitive equipment aboard MAVEN from possible harm, some instruments were turned off during the flyby; the same was done for other Mars […]