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Showing Articles for: Mars Global Surveyor Total Articles: 131 Newest: May 03, 2010 |
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Happy St. Valentine's Day from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team! This collection of images acquired over the past 3 Mars years shows some of the heart-shaped features found on Mars by the MGS MOC.
Two full Martian years of global Mars temperature readings, equal in time to about four Earth years, from the Mars Global Surveyor's (MGS) onboard Thermal Emission Spectrometer are revealing a planet where global dust storms, water ice, and the distance to the sun trigger long-lasting changes in the Martian climate.
Scientists have used an orbiting Mars craft to photograph robotic landers that have been sitting dormant on the surface of the red planet since their missions ended. Using a newly developed trick, the researchers imaged Mars Pathfinder, which in 1997 thrilled earthlings with its photographs and the wandering science exploits of its Sojourner rover. Pathfinder appears as a dark dot near a rock that scientists named Yogi during the mission. The Viking 1 lander from 1976 is also visible, as a bright dot in a separate image.
Like a celebrity under constant photographic scrutiny, Mars continues to show fresh and surprising faces. And as with an enigmatic Hollywood star, more than 10,000 new images of the red planet reveal more puzzles than answers. "Mars just keeps astounding us with its complexity," said Ken Edgett, staff scientist for Malin Space Science Systems, which built and operates the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor.
Thousands of newly released portraits of martian landscapes from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft testify to the diversity of ways geological processes have sculpted the surface of our neighboring planet.
If you were given a chance to aim the camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter and take a picture of something on the red planet, what would you shoot? Now we know, after NASA released today the first picture selected from hundreds of public suggestions. The photo reveals a thick layer of dust blanketing the floor and wall of the summit crater atop a tall volcano called Pavonis Mons.
In orbit around the Red Planet since 1997, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has captured more than 123,000 pictures of the martian surface. But according to Ken Edgett of Malin Space Science Systems, the group that operates Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), the camera's narrow-angle (high-resolution) system has only examined about 3 percent of the planet's craters, dunes, gullies, canyons, volcanoes, and other surface features. Now, Edgett and other members of the camera team are looking for some help to select future martian locales to image up close. They've established a website where you — yes, you — can submit ideas for where Mars Global Surveyor's camera looks next.
NASA on Thursday released what it billed as the first portrait of Earth as seen from Mars. The colorized photograph shows Earth from 86 million miles away as a small blue dot orbited by its even smaller moon. The keen-eyed can make out clouds over the central and eastern United States and northern South America, as well as portions of Central America and the Gulf of Mexico, in a specially processed blowup of the image. NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft took the picture while orbiting the Red Planet on May 8.
Have you ever wondered what you would see if you stood on Mars looking back at the Earth through a small telescope? Now you can see Earth through the eyes of our space-faring wanderer -- the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft -- which currently orbits the Red Planet. In fact, the spacecraft has flown around Mars for years, since September 1997.
The camera team for NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission is beginning daily Internet postings of pictures that showcase the rich diversity of martian landscapes. The first "Mars Orbiter Camera Picture of the Day" shows frost-covered sand dunes in the springtime as they begin to defrost.
Mars Global Surveyor has been orbiting the red planet since Sept. 12, 1997. The mission has examined the entire Mars surface and provided a wealth of information about the planet's atmosphere and interior. A new batch of high resolution photos, taken between February and July 2002, were added online this month and they bring the total number of images in the online gallery to more than 123,800. The images are available from the Mars Orbiter Camera Gallery.
The winds of Mars leave their marks on many of the 11,664 new pictures being posted on the Internet today by the camera team for NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission. In one image, the pattern of sand dunes on a patch of southern-hemisphere desert resembles scales on a fish. On a larger scale, full-globe Mars images show wispy water ice clouds shaped by winds as the seasons change. Other new images reveal details of features such as gullies, landslides and seasonal frost.
New information about what is inside Mars shows the red planet has a molten liquid iron core, confirming the interior of the planet has some similarity to Earth and Venus. Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., analyzing three years of radio tracking data from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, concluded that Mars has not cooled to a completely solid iron core, rather its interior is made up of either a completely liquid iron core or a liquid outer core with a solid inner core. Their results are published in the March 7, 2003 online issue of the journal Science.
Mars Global Surveyor passed a milestone earlier this month when its 100,000th image was added to NASA's online image gallery for the mission. The total number of photographs is now more than twice the combined quantity supplied by the Viking orbiters in the 1970s. More interesting is the detail included in the new images. One is said to be among the most detailed views ever provided of the Red Planet. Another reveals new clues about a mysterious "Inca City" on Mars.
One of the highest-resolution images ever obtained from the red planet-- a view of gullies in a crater in the Newton Basin-- is among an astounding group of 18,812 images being added to NASA's Mars Global Surveyor online image gallery today.
Northside Elementary School students took a cosmic trip to Mars, the red planet, on Wednesday without having to leave the earth's atmosphere. The school is the only one in the 5th Congressional District to receive NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which is funded through a grant awarded to Northside, said Principal Linda Crute. Students have the opportunity to become actively involved in the Mars Global Surveyor mission by learning about the Martian environment and making discoveries along with mission science teams.
Now in its extended mission, the Mars Global Surveyor is revealing intriguing features of our neighbor as a planet once veiled by enormous dust storms. The latest images also reveal that Mars' northern pole may hold only half as much water in its ice cap than previously thought, along with unusual geologic features that tell of their age and the planet's wind patterns. The Surveyor or MGS as it is called continues to add to its photo archive of over 93,000 images of the Red Planet.
Scientists and engineers have been busy putting together the newest volume of the photo anthology produced by the Mars Global Surveyor mission. The latest release of 15,251 images expands the collection to over 93,000 snapshots. Every six months, Malin Space Science Systems, which operates Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), shares a new group of images after preparing them for public release. The latest compilation comes from the first six months of the orbiter's extended mission, which began February 1, 2001.
The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 1997, was relegated to the media shadows early this year when it's new sister craft, Mars Odyssey, began returning pictures and found intriguing evidence for water ice near the surface of Mars. However, Surveyor, also called MGS, is alive and well and still producing remarkable photographs with its onboard Mars Orbiter Camera. Most of the pictures do not individually provide for important findings, but many are interesting nonetheless.
A view of the red planet almost completely enveloped in dust storms is one of 15,251 newly released images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor. These images bring the total number of snapshots taken by the spacecraft to more than 93,000. The latest images to be added to the online archive are from the first phase of the Mars Global Surveyor extended mission, which began February 1, 2001. Regions that were poorly covered during the primary mapping mission due to regional dust storms have now been captured.
Intricate "fixes" from Earth have kept the Mars Global Surveyor working well beyond its original mission. The spacecraft is now in its second extension following a very successful primary mission and is providing scientists with valuable information about how the red planet changes over time. Since there are no service garages in space, mission planners have to perform any needed repairs from the ground, including finding ways to save fuel.
Weather reports from Mars, global mapping, inspection of potential landing sites, more data about the red planet than from all previous missions - no problem for the hardworking Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. In fact, the Global Surveyor has been so successful that it earned an extension following conclusion of its prime mapping mission early in 2001. The second extension began in April 2002 and will continue the mission into late 2004.
For three years, Ken Edgett & Mike Malin have each spent as much as 80 hours a week staring at new images (more than 100,000 so far) gathered by a gadget called MOC, for Mars Orbiter Camera, which has been circling the planet since 1997 aboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. The camera, which Malin designed and built for NASA, is a technical triumph that could see a golf cart from 250 miles up. Malin Space Science Systems has been analyzing the stream of images it radios home. Malin and Edgett's eyewitness reports are part of a continuing revolution in scientists' view of Mars. In spite of some spectacular failures–spacecraft that crashed, blew up, or went astray–a string of NASA probes have reached the planet in the past five years: Mars Global Surveyor and a lander, both in 1997, and the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which arrived last year to chart surface chemistry. Together they are revealing an unexpectedly complex and baffling planet. "The Mars we see is not the simple Mars we'd heard about," Malin says.
A strange mesa really stands out on the red planet on Valentine's Day. So does a pit that extends more than a mile in length. The heart-shaped landforms are among thousands of bizarre features spied by the Mars Global Surveyor, a NASA satellite that has conducted photo shoots of the planet for more than four years. The light-colored heart, a mesa in the south polar region, is about 255 meters (279 yards) across, according to NASA. The presence of the mesa suggests that a layer of brighter material once covered the rougher, darker terrain around it.
The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) Extended Mission has included dozens of opportunities to point the spacecraft directly at features of interest so that pictures of things not seen during the earlier Mapping Mission can be obtained. The example shown here is a small meteorite impact crater in northern Tharsis near 17.2 deg N, 113.8 deg W. Viking Orbiter images from the late 1970's showed at this location what appeared to be a dark patch with dark rays emanating from a brighter center. The MOC team surmised that the dark rays may be indicating the location of a fresh crater formed by impact sometime in the past few centuries (since dark ray are quickly covered by dust falling out of the martian atmosphere).
Extended mission operations for the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) has provided thousands of opportunities to image sites previously seen by the camera. Often, these are chances to see if anything on the planet has changed. The most surprising changes were documented starting in August 2001, when the south polar cap emerged from winter darkness. In 1999 MOC found that the south polar cap exhibits an array of bizarre layers, arcuate scarps, and "swiss cheese" holes and pits. How these formed was unknown. Once MOC began to re-image theseareas in 2001, however, the team discovered that the polar scarps had changed. They had retreated approximately 3 meters (about 3 yards) in less than one Mars year (a Mars year is 687 Earth days long). In some places, small buttes completely disappeared.
In 1999, the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) aboard the MGS orbiter acquired a global stereo image dataset using its red-filter Wide Angle Camera. We have recently completed a 256 pixel/degree (about 230 meters/pixel) mosaic of these images using software developed at Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS).
A NASA spacecraft has taken its 100,000th picture of Mars, far eclipsing the photographic bounty returned by any other mission to the Red Planet. Scientists received the image from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor on Nov. 5, nearly five years to the day after the robotic satellite was launched. No other spacecraft has taken as many pictures of Mars. NASA's twin Viking orbiters have come the closest, returning a total of about 55,000 images of the planet between 1975 and 1980.
Harris Corporation, a world leader in advanced image processing solutions, announced today that it is providing software to help scientists and engineers gain a new perspective of Mars by creating the first high-resolution, image-based digital elevation models of the planet. The models, which are developed using images collected by the Mars Global Surveyor, will be used for detailed studies of surface features and to locate potential sites for future exploratory missions.
Recently released images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor show the dynamic Martian terrain is anything but dull. Although the Martian northern plains are often considered to be "flat" or "featureless," the MOC has shown that, at the scale of a few tens of meters (tens of yards), these plains aren't at all "boring". In the October 2001 MOC image shown at right, a suite of sharply-outlined pits and fractures indicate that the upper surface materials are strong and indurated (cemented).
A NASA orbiter set to start circling Mars later this month has tough shoes to fill -- its predecessor exposed an unprecedented bounty of global data on the planet's water history and suitability for human colonies. The earlier probe -- Mars Global Surveyor -- and its six scientific instruments have delivered more than 130 CD ROMS-worth of data during its primary mission which started in March 1999. The incoming spacecraft, called Mars Odyssey, will follow up with even higher quality data also aimed at paving the way for NASA's goal to put humans on Mars.
New pictures of Mars' south polar cap and a global view of a dust storm occurring there were released Friday by the imaging team for NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. Marking the four-year anniversary of its arrival at Mars, Global Surveyor's camera took a wide-angle view of the Martian south polar region on Sept. 12, 2001. Several dramatic dust storms that began a few months ago also are seen in a color image. One is located near the Martian equator, and the other is shown northwest of the Ascraeus Mons volcano.
There is an emerging community of scientists interested in the use of Thermal Emission Spectrometer data for exploring the surface and atmosphere of Mars. The TES data sets are both rich with potential for exciting discoveries and daunting in their scope and utilization. The tools, techniques, and knowledge that are necessary for working with TES data have been evolving since before the MGS mission and now are at a level of maturity that can be shared with the community. It is our goal to present our experience with TES data and laboratory thermal IR spectroscopy in a way that will encourage the use of both. The planned 2-day workshop is intended to be both a short course and a forum for the presentation of current TES data analysis by the community. A third (optional) day will allow attendees to visit the Granite Wash Mountains in western Arizona as part of a demonstration on the combined use of thermal IR remote sensing, field spectroscopy, and lab spectroscopy with an eye toward present and upcoming Mars missions.
Whipped by 100 mph winds, a monster dust storm is fast covering the face of Mars and could soon smother the entire planet in fine red sandy particles, scientists reported yesterday. First spotted barely a month ago in images from the Mars Global Surveyor, the storm has already covered more than 40 million square miles and is growing day by day, according to Philip Christensen, a planetary geologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Oscar-winning composer Vangelis has dedicated his latest composition to the Nasa space mission to Mars. He has confessed a life-long passion for space ahead of a gala performance in the Temple of Zeus in his native Greece. But the concert has been criticised for risking the safety of the ancient ruins at the Athens temple.
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft recently caught sight of a dust devil dancing across the Martian surface. While it isn't the first of the tornado-like weather systems to be imaged, it is yet another reminder that Mars is an ever-changing planet. Dr. Ken Edgett, a staff scientist at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, Calif., regularly tracks the dust devils and studies surface features. As the operator for the Surveyor's orbiter camera, he is one of the first to see fascinating images of the red planet. Dr. Edgett recently discussed the importance of dust devils and how they are transforming the look of Mars.
Daily global maps, created with images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, provide a moving picture of Martian weather during 1999-2000 similar to the familiar satellite weather maps we see of Earth. The Martian weather maps will be presented today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Boston by Dr. Andrew Ingersoll, professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and an interdisciplinary scientist with Mars Global Surveyor and member of the imaging team.
Now in its Extended Mission, Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) is into its second Mars year of systematic observations of the Red Planet. With the Extended Mission slated to run through April 2002, the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) is being used, among other things, to look for changes that have occurred in the past Martian year. (Because Mars is farther from the Sun than Earth, its year is longer -- about 687 Earth days.)
NASA has made available 10,230 new images of the planet Mars. The latest release boosts to more than 67,500 the total number of pictures taken by cameras aboard the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft and released to the public. NASA successfully launched another Martian satellite, the Mars Odyssey, on Saturday. The probe will join Surveyor in orbit around Mars this October.
Toward the end of its Primary Mapping Mission, Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) acquired one of its most spectacular pictures of layered sedimentary rock exposed within the ancient crater Becquerel. Pictures such as this one from January 25, 2001, underscore the fact that you never know from one day to the next what the next MOC images will uncover.
More signs of water, dunes that resemble shark's teeth and the passage of time are chronicled in the latest batch of Red Planet images released by Malin Space Sciences Systems, the operator of the camera aboard NASA's current Mars orbiter. Mars Global Surveyor ended its main mission last week after collecting global data throughout a complete 26-month Martian year. The probe is set to continue taking pictures of Mars through 2002 on an extended mission. So far, images taken by this spacecraft's camera have been interpreted as showing evidence of ancient lake beds and recent water seeping up to the surface.
Sometimes Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) images show things that look very bizzare. Unique among the MOC images is a suite of pictures from northwestern Hellas Planitia.
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has collected more information about the red planet than all previous missions combined, completes its primary science mission today and begins a new era of continued exploration. "By any conceivable measure the scientific impact of Mars Global Surveyor has been extraordinary. In many ways we now know Mars to be a different planet than when the spacecraft arrived in 1997, and our perspective continues to evolve as the data keep flowing," said Dr. Arden Albee, Global Surveyor project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "In some aspects, we now have better maps of Mars than we do of Earth."
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor will complete its primary mapping mission of Mars on January 31, 2001 after a mapping mission that lasted one full Mars year (687 days). During this time MGS was able to globally map the planet while monitoring seasonal changes. With the spacecraft and instruments still healthy and collecting excellent data NASA has approved an extended mission that will commence directly after the mapping mission. As a result data from the MOLA laser altimeter instrument will keep flowing.
NASA has given a thumbs-up for an extension of the Mars Global Surveyor’s (MGS) mission to study the Red Planet until April 2002. Doing so enables scientists to zoom in on prospective touchdown zones for future robotic landers. MGS is to end a nominal assignment of mapping the planet from orbit for one Martian year on February 1, 2001. Mars takes 687 Earth days to travel around the Sun, making a Martian year almost two Earth years long. Cost of putting the MGS on an extended mission is $16.2 million.
Last week's revelation from Mars Global Surveyor data--that sedimentary rocks suggest past bodies of water on the red planet--is just the latest discovery by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory spacecraft.
High-resolution pictures of Mars show evidence for sedimentary rocks laid down by ancient lakes and shallow seas. It is a discovery of huge importance, say scientists. With these images, and the evidence earlier this year that water may have flowed on the surface of the Red Planet in the recent geological past, scientists are realising just how like Earth Mars could once have been.
NASA will announce Dec. 7 that scientists have made a ‘major’ discovery on Mars using images acquired by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. Imaging scientists Michael Malin and Ken Edgett will present what they describe as their "most significant discovery yet" during the press conference, scheduled for 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (19:00 GMT) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Further details of the findings are to be published in the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Science, but remain under embargo until the time of the press conference.
NASA has released a quartet of Martian images that show several of the Red Planet’s numerous craters patched with snow-white frost. The American space agency’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter captured the images as part of its ongoing monitoring of the seasonal advance and retreat of polar frosts on the planet’ s surface. The four images render wide-angle views of four distinct craters -- two each in Mars' northern and southern hemispheres. They are located the middle polar latitudes of each hemisphere.
The imaging team of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has doubled the number of Mars pictures available to the public with the release of a new archive of red planet pictures totally slightly more than 30,000 images. The archive contains all the pictures that were taken by Mars Global Surveyor from September 1999 through February 2000 and includes the images that were taken to search for the Mars Polar Lander spacecraft. No evidence of the lander was ever seen.
As NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor heads into its fourth year in orbit around the Red Planet, mission scientists released a recent wide-angle image snapped by the spacecraft of three apparent water-carved valleys. Scientists believe torrents of water carved the valleys at some distant point in the Martian past, scouring the planet’s surface with a sudden outburst.
Since March 1999 the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter aboard the MGS spacecraft has been sending back data on the topology of Mars. NASA kindly made the data available and in March of this year I started downloading it to create my own 3D model of Mars.
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft currently orbiting the Red Planet carries the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument. MOLA transmits infrared laser pulses towards Mars and measures the time of flight to determine the range of the spacecraft to the surface below. Scientists can then use the measurements to develop a precise topographic map of the terrain.
The ten most significant science achievements of MGS during its first year of mapping, ordered from the interior of the planet outward...
Amid the excitement caused by last week's announcement that water may have been active on the surface of Mars in the very recent past, top planetary geologists are stressing that the conclusions are still very much speculative. While water could be responsible for the striking gully-like features seen in recent pictures from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, there are other explanations, the scientists said.
The Mars Global Surveyor has beamed back exciting pictures for scientists to ponder for years to come, but it did not arrive at the Red Planet unscathed. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had to redesign the craft's approach to Mars soon after launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in November, 1996. One of the two 18-foot-long solar panels had snapped open like a screen door in a gale. The other panel unfolded smoothly.
This recent Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera image shows mesas and smaller buttes that occur on the Elysium Plains, approximately 185 miles south of the Cerberus region in the Martian eastern hemisphere. Like the world-famous Monument Valley located in the Navajo Nation on the border of Arizona and Utah, this "Martian Monument Valley" consists of a series of mesas and buttes that have formed by erosion of layered bedrock.
The Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera narrow angle image shows what, at first glance, might look like a "hot crossed bun" on the martian northern plains.
One of the most puzzling findings of the Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera investigation has been the discovery of many surfaces of sharp, parallel ridges and grooves that -- at first glance -- look like dunes, but upon closer inspection turn out to be something else.
To celebrate NASA’s recent release of over 25,000 Mars images snapped between March and August of 1999, Space.com presents our picks for the 20 most beautiful and geologically interesting images of the bunch. Click on thumbnails to see full-sized images.
If you’ve been pining for images of another world, NASA has a website for you. More than 25,000 new images of planet Mars have recently been made available for viewing on a public website operated by Malin Space Science Systems of San Diego, California.
More than 20,000 new images of the planet Mars taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available in a web-based photo album -- the single largest one-time release of images for any planet in the history of solar system exploration. The 'picture postcard' scenes in the new images reveal the Red Planet, often said to be the most Earth-like planet, as an alien, bizarre and puzzling world.
A newly released NASA image gives viewers a high-flying peek at the top of Olympus Mons, a martian behemoth that is the largest known volcano in the solar system.
Most terrain of scientific interest on Mars is too rugged for the small landing craft NASA has been sending, extensive new photographs indicate.
At this year's annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in Houston Mars was once again a star attraction. Despite the embarrassing fiasco of the 1998 Mars probes, there is a flood of important new information coming in from Mars Global Surveyor, the one working Mars spacecraft.
Swirling dust devils were caught in the act of changing the surface of Mars by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, scientists said Monday.
New high-resolution images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft comparing the ice caps at the North and South poles show surprising differences between the two regions. The North polar cap has a relatively flat, pitted surface that resembles cottage cheese, while the South polar cap has larger pits, troughs and flat mesas that give it a holey Swiss-cheese appearance.
New observations of Mars reveal that the planet's flat northern lowlands were an early zone of high heat flow that later may have been the site of rapid water accumulation, according to a view of the Martian interior generated using data from Mars Global Surveyor (MGS).
New high resolution images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft comparing the ice caps at the North and South poles show the difference between the two regions is in the "cheese." The North polar cap has a relatively flat, pitted surface that resembles cottage cheese, while the South polar cap has larger pits, troughs and flat mesas that give it a holey Swiss-cheese appearance.
In a paper published March 3 in the journal Science, Arizona State University geologists Josh Bandfield, Vicky Hamilton, and Philip Christensen report the first results of a major survey being performed by the Mars Global Surveyor's Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) of the planet's mineral composition. TES measures the thermal infrared energy (heat) emitted from Mars and records the unique infrared spectra emitted by specific minerals. Scientists then use this data to map the mineral composition of the planet's surface.
We know Mars is not made of cheese, but Cornell researcher Peter Thomas points out that some telling new features on the red planet look a lot like the Swiss variety. More importantly, the landforms hold clues to how permafrost develops at the poles and shapes the look of the land.
Over the past six months, the southern hemisphere of Mars has passed through spring and into summer. Spring started in early August 1999 and summer arrived toward the end of December 1999. Mars Global Sureyor (MGS) is in a polar orbit, thus the spacecraft's Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) has had an excellent view of the daily changes that have occurred as the south polar frosts sublimed away during spring and into the summer season.
Newly released images of Mars show a wide variety of sand dunes stud its surface -- from shifting piles active in recent years to others so old they are pocked with the scars of ancient impact craters.
Ever imagined what Mars would like from an orbiting spacecraft? NASA this week released a short Y2K Mars "movie," composed of images snapped by a camera onboard the Mars Global Surveyor.
The Mars Global Surveyor celebrated Earth's New Year's Day while working some 250 miles above the Red Planet, sending back several high-resolution pictures of the martian surface. One of its first images of the new year shows the sandy bluffs, dunes and buttes of a region some 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) north of the equator. The region, located at 33 degrees north latitude and 63 degrees east longitude, is called Nilosyrtis Mensae.
Forgetting for a moment the two high-profile mission failures that recently marred NASA's Mars program, 1999 was actually a remarkable year for discovery about Mars, many leading planetary scientists say. Evidence is steadily streaming in from the Mars Global Surveyor that the planet may have been underestimated. Far from being the dead, cold, simple planet it has often been thought of, Mars seems to have had a complex, dynamic past, with an active iron core that produced a strong magnetic field, and a surface covered with huge oceans and perhaps even hot springs.
NASA's lone Mars orbiter started a photographic search for its latest lost mission at the red planet Thursday. But the scientist who designed the orbiter's camera is pessimistic about the chances of finding Mars Polar Lander. "The probability of seeing something is pretty small," said geologist Mike Malin, mostly because of the poor illumination of the suspected landing area.
It hasn't been a good year for Mars missions. But one Mars probe is turning in an award-winning performance this month as "Best Spacecraft in a Supporting Role."
Scientists will try to learn later this week whether the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander landed on the Martian surface even though they have not been able to make direct contact with the spacecraft.
In an article to be published in Science magazine Dec. 10, 1999, Brown University planetary geologist James Head and five colleagues present topographical measurements which they say are consistent with an ocean that dried up hundreds of millions of years ago. The measurements were taken by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, an instrument aboard the unmanned spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor which is circling the planet.
Some of the latest images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been mapping the red planet since earlier this year, reveal just how much work is ahead for the Mars Polar Lander.
The operators of the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor have released the most detailed picture yet taken of the martian polar layered terrain -- the enigmatic ground that will be the target of the Mars Polar Lander's investigations when it arrives there Dec. 3.
Bright lines reminiscent of the cracked clay in a dry lake bed on Earth crisscross areas of Mars' polar regions, and may indicate the presence of water ice, some scientists believe
The shadow of the Martian moon, Phobos, has been captured by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft.
Newly-released images from the camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor show the shadow of Mars' tiny moon Phobos cast on the red dust of the planet's surface.
High-resolution images from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) have revealed small cone-shaped structures on lava flows in southern Elysium Planitia, Marte Valles, and northwestern Amazonis Planitia in the northern hemisphere of the red planet. The most likely interpretation of these cones is that they may be volcanic features known as "pseudocraters" or "rootless cones".
New images from the Mars Global Surveyor's orbiting camera show cone-shaped structures likely to be "pseudocraters" -- volcanic features that give clues to the history and location of water on Mars.
The uneven tumult of the "chaotic terrain" of Mars' equatorial latitudes is showcased in vivid detail in a new image from Mars Global Surveyor's orbiting camera. The image shows large low-lying basins filled with sand dunes that lie between bordering bluffs and crater-pocked highlands.
This image, taken by the camera on the Mars Global Surveyor, shows the martian volcano Arsia Mons on the right of the frame. Towering some 30,000 feet (9 kilometers) above the surrounding plains, Arsia Mons is one of the largest volcanoes known. The volcano's summit -- a large crater called a caldera -- is approximately 68 miles (110 kilometers) across.
Newly released images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor show that the red planet is a different place today than it was two years ago when the spacecraft arrived -- a world constantly reshaped by forces of nature including shifting sand dunes, monster dust devils, wind storms, frosts and polar ice caps that grow and retreat with the seasons.
The camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor, now orbiting Mars, has captured several images of ice-covered sands, blowing dunes, huge swirling dust devils and other weather-related surface changes in Mars' cold windy deserts.
It all goes to show that if you look hard enough at a craters, mountain ranges and deserts you will see all kinds of interesting shapes. Some took that to absurd levels when they claimed that a mountain on Mars was actually a "face" sculpted by a long-extinct civilisation.
First, Mars seemed to greet NASA's mapping orbiter with a smile. Now, it seems as if the red planet has sent a valentine in one of the latest pictures from the spacecraft's camera.
Scientists studying Mars say they are seeing "a new planet." Mars itself hasn't changed. But data pouring in from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are changing scientists' perspective.
Arden Albee is often asked how it felt to lose the Mars Observer. Albee was project scientist of the ill-fated space probe that somehow lost its way in the depths of space in 1993. On its final approach to Mars, scientists lost contact and never heard or saw anything of the spacecraft again. To this day, neither Albee nor anyone else is certain what happened.
Mars Global Surveyor is healthy and all of its science instruments are turned on. A gimbal, or hinge, on the spacecraft's dish-shaped high-gain antenna still has a restriction that limits its range of motion, but this will have no effect on the mission until next February when the Mars-to-Earth geometry will again prevent the antenna from pointing continuously at Earth.
The Mars gremlins have struck again. In the midst of a mapping mission already plagued by near-disastrous problems, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor now is cruising around the Red Planet with a jammed communications antenna.
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft returned to mapping operations Thursday with its high-gain telecommunications antenna in a fixed position.
Initial tests of a stuck high gain attenna aboard Mars Global Surveyor are looking problematic with the hinges controlling the attenna moving freely in one direction but not the other. Further tests are planned over the week.
Flight controllers for NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission are continuing to work toward isolating what caused a hinge on the spacecraft's high-gain telecommunications antenna to stop moving last week.
A steady stream of new data from Mars, including high-resolution images, will begin arriving next week at Earth receiving stations following yesterday's deployment of the Mars Global Surveyor's high-power communications antenna.
A steady stream of new data from Mars, including high-resolution images, will begin arriving next week at Earth receiving stations following yesterday's deployment of the Mars Global Surveyor's high-power communications antenna.
Now firmly settled in its final mapping orbit, the Mars Global Surveyor (MSG) spacecraft has started sending back to Earth a series of stunning, detailed images of the Martian surface.
Two decades after the twin Viking orbiters wowed scientists with images of Mars' gargantuan volcanoes and canyons, a new robotic envoy is ready to lift the veil on the red planet's mysterious past.
The Mars Global Surveyor has finally begun mapping the red planet, turning an array of instruments on Earth's dusty neighbor a year later than originally planned. "All our instruments are on now," flight operations manager Joseph Beerer said Tuesday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
The Mars Global Surveyor mission has finally entered into a mapping orbit after completing a successful campaign of aerobraking. The mission was originally scheduled to complete aerobraking over a year ago, but a problem with one of the spacecraft's solar panels prompted mission controllers to use more conservative aerobraking techniques, which took a lot longer.
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft will begin its primary mapping mission within the next two weeks, following a successful firing of its main engine on Feb. 19 to fine-tune its path around the red planet into a nearly circular, Sun-synchronous orbit.
After analyzing hundreds of high-resolution pictures of the Martian surface taken by the orbiting Mars Surveyor spacecraft, a team of researchers finds that weathering and winds on the planet create landforms, especially sand dunes, remarkably similar to those in some deserts on Earth.
For the first time a spacecraft has successfully obtained a stable circular orbit using aerobraking as the primary method for deceleration. At 12.11am Feb 4, Surveyor fired its main engine raising its orbit completely out of the Martian atmosphere marking the end of the aerobraking phase and the start of the primary mapping mission
Mars Global Surveyor began entered its final aerobraking phase, known as the "walk-out" phase. During this final stage of aerobraking, the spacecraft will be bumped higher in four four steps.
From a mechanical lemon on its Mars Global Surveyor probe, NASA has crafted scientific lemonade. The space agency today unveiled snapshots of the Martian surface that display features ranging from taller-than-Mount-Everest volcanoes to flat-as-a-sheet plains.
Some of the most interesting pictures of the red planet taken to date are now available courtesy of the Lockheed Martin-built Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). The strange, layered terrain of the southern polar region of Mars represents a very different view of the planet than ever seen before. This region of Mars will be the landing site for the 1998 Mars Polar Lander currently under construction at Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, Colo.
After a two-week hiatus, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) flight team will resume lowering the spacecraft's orbit around Mars beginning Nov. 7. The effort will proceed at a more gradual pace than before, which will extend the mission's aerobraking phase by several months, and will change Global Surveyor's final science mapping orbit.
You know all about Mars Pathfinder, which landed on the Red Planet in July and set the world abuzz by dispatching a small rover and sending back breathtaking pictures of a rusty, alien world. Now it's the turn of its sistership - NASA's Mars Global Surveyor - to put on a show.