California middle school students using the camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter have found lava tubes with one pit that appears to be a skylight to a cave. The students in science teacher Dennis Mitchell's class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., were examining Martian lava tubes as their project in the Mars Student Imaging Program offered by NASA and Arizona State University. Students in this program develop a geological question, then target a Mars-orbiting camera to take an image that helps answer the question. Mars Odyssey has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001, returning data and images of the Martian surface and providing relay communications service for the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

Feel a buzz in your pocket? That's Mars calling your iPhone. Thanks to a new — and free — iPhone app, users can have images of Mars delivered daily to their device. The images come from an Arizona State University-designed camera on-board NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, and they include every kind of feature there is on the Red Planet. The iPhone app is available through the iTunes website.

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter put itself into a safe standby mode on Saturday, Nov. 28, and the team operating the spacecraft has begun implementing careful steps designed to resume Odyssey's science and relay operations within about a week. Engineers have diagnosed the cause of the Nov. 28 event as the spacecraft's proper response to a memory error with a known source. The likely cause is an upset in the orbiter's "memory error external bus," as was the case with a similar event in June 2008. In safe mode over the weekend, Odyssey remained in communication with ground controllers and maintained healthy temperatures and power. To clear the memory error, the team commanded Odyssey today to perform a cold reboot of the orbiter's onboard computer. The spacecraft reported that the reboot had been completed successfully.

The Mars Odyssey mission may not be the latest or most glamorous Martian explorer, but it’s the longest-running, and it does boast an impressive thermal imaging system. Orbiting the planet as it does, Odyssey’s scientific packages continue to provide a very rich picture of the fourth planet’s aerology. Last September 30, Odyssey was directed to alter its orbit to gain even better sensitivity for its infrared mineral mapping of Martian minerals. The adjustment will allow THEMIS to look down at sites in mid-afternoon, rather than late afternoon, collecting infrared radiation when the rocks are warmer. Previously, its orbit was a compromise between THEMIS and the mission’s Gamma Ray Spectrometer. Part of the Gamma Ray Spectrometer is being turned off. In addition to the increase in time, THEMIS will now occasionally be aimed obliquely, rather than straight down, allowing the team to do some 3D imaging.

A NASA probe circling Mars is back at full strength as researchers ponder its past views of possible cave entrances on the red planet's surface. The agency's Mars Odyssey spacecraft resumed science operations this week after spending several days in 'safe mode' due to a Sept. 14 software glitch. While in safe mode, a precautionary configuration designed to preserve the orbiter's health during a glitch, engineers on Earth methodically restored Odyssey's onboard systems. "The spacecraft reacted exactly as it was designed to for this condition," said Robert Mase, NASA's Odyssey mission manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., earlier this week.

The Mars Odyssey orbiter was in safe mode Monday after a computer glitch prevented the 6-year-old spacecraft from relaying data from the twin rovers rolling across the Martian surface. Project leaders said the Mars Odyssey was not in danger. Engineers discovered the problem Friday after a software glitch caused the onboard computers to reboot. The spacecraft last went into safe mode was in December when it was hit by a cosmic ray. Mission manager Bob Mase of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said he expected the Mars Odyssey to return to normal by the middle of the week.

A NASA spacecraft circling Mars has spied, for the first time, two of its fellow probes orbiting the red planet. Red planet veteran Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) successfully photographed NASA’s Mars Odyssey probe and the European-built Mars Express spacecraft during a series of observations released Thursday. From its polar orbit around Mars, the MGS probe found Mars Express first as the two spacecraft flew over the red planet on April 20. Separated from its orbital target by a distance of 155 miles (249 kilometers), the MGS probed turned its Mars Orbiter Camera lens toward the passing spacecraft to snap the first two images of a red planet orbiter.

Five spacecraft are circling Mars and creeping across its ruddy surface, looking for traces of long-gone waters and signs that the cold, arid planet may once have been hospitable to life. The robotic martian invasion - three orbiters and two six-wheeled rovers - has already uncovered strong evidence that water once flowed on Mars and is now locked in subsurface ice. But big questions about water on Mars remain. When did it flow? How long did it last? How much was there? Where did it come from? Where did it go? Perhaps the most tantalizing question: Were there long-lived watery environments where microbial life could have gained a foothold?

Recent analyses of ESA’s Mars Express data reveal that concentrations of water vapour and methane in the atmosphere of Mars significantly overlap. This result, from data obtained by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS), gives a boost to understanding of geological and atmospheric processes on Mars, and provides important new hints to evaluate the hypothesis of present life on the Red Planet.

NASA's Mars Odyssey mission, originally scheduled to end on Tuesday, has been granted a stay of execution until at least September 2006, reveal NASA scientists. The spacecraft has returned a string of important discoveries about the Red Planet since its launch in 2001, and has been pivotal in the success of the recent Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. NASA has agreed to fund the mission at $15 million a year for a further two years - the equivalent of three-quarters of Odyssey's original budget.

This latest volume brings the exploration of Mars up to date. Including the latest results from the amazingly successful Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, as well as progress reports from the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey missions. 416 pages with 248 pages of color images INCLUDES DVD-V / DVD-ROM.

This colorization is the result of a collaboration between THEMIS team members at Cornell University and space artist Don Davis, who is an expert on true-color renderings of planetary and astronomical objects. Davis began with calibrated and co-registered THEMIS VIS multi-band radiance files produced by the Cornell group. Using as a guide true-color imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope and his own personal experience at Mt. Wilson and other observatories, he performed a manual color balance to match more closely the colors of previous visual Mars observations.

Our group is from Saratoga Springs, NY and is called the Saratoga Springs NASA Club. It contains approximately 30 students between 9th and 12th grade who have been participating since September of 2001. We also worked with a small group of students from Chekhov, Russia in order to do a joint MSIP project. Chekhov is the sister city of Saratoga Springs. Their group contains kids of the same age group as our NASA Club. Our group, along with a few students from the Chekhov branch, visited Arizona State University in November of 2003. This image is causing us considerable difficulty due to the presence of a structure that resembles a lake located in the center of the crater.

There's a little spot on Mars, fairly close to the equator, that a few Phoenix kids know better than their own back yards. Ten students from Madison No. 1 Elementary School scoured an 11- by 34-mile patch of the Red Planet for signs of water. But they didn't use just any old picture of Mars for their research. They studied an image shot especially for them by a camera on NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

The HAND, a gauge of Russian design and manufacture at the USA's Mars Odysseus station, discovered water ice on Mars back in March 2002, expert Igor Mitrofanov said to Novosti. Laboratory head at the Space Research Institute under the Russian Academy of Sciences, he led HAND design and a related experiment. Neutron flows from Mars have been mapped by now. The available global maps have a resolving power of 200 to 300 kilometres. Neutron flows allow to spot water at great distance, explained our informant.