Unfortunately, we have been forced by our ISP to disable the comment function of MarsNews.com. There are too many spammers out there that keep attacking our site and using up resources. We hope that in the future we will be able to offer comments again, but we can't promise anything in the short-term. You can still make use of our Forums to discuss newsworthy topics.

We have resolved the issues with Comments on the site and have re-enabled them. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope you will continue to comment on our daily news links.

A note to comment spammers: submitting comment spam to MarsNews.com is a waste of time, since we have the "nofollow" tag and -- assuming you got past all our defenses -- your spam will not be indexed by Google or seen by any of our users.

Due to the rampant problems with Comment Spam attacks on the server, we need to temporarily disable comments while we come up with a better solution to offer them to our readers.

We have completed a significant upgrade to the backend of MarsNews.com, bringing the software to Movable Type 3.11. Since initially moving to the award-winning weblog package earlier this year, we have been very pleased by its ease of use and powerful abilities to rebuild the website with one click. We highly recommend it!

Comments are now working correctly, and you now have the option of getting a free TypeKey login so you don't have to re-enter your name & email every time.

We have also installed the excellent MT-Blacklist plugin by Jay Allen, to help eliminate comment spam.

Thanks for visiting MarsNews.com and please let us know your comments and suggestions!

MarsNews.com has just reached a significant milestone: our 5,000th article has been posted into the NewsWire Database, which contains 32 categories of Mars-related topics and contains articles as far back as 1977!

The NewsWire Database, which was founded in 1999 along with the website itself, places MarsNews.com onto a level above other space news sites. No other online media source offers a free, searchable catalog of stories about Mars with this volume of information.

Thanks for visiting MarsNews.com and we hope you will continue to enjoy all the news and background information that the site has to offer.

James Burk and Dustin Green
MarsNews.com Editors

We have completed the migration of all 4,500 news article links from the old site to the new NewsWire Database. All links have been checked and all stories are categorized appropriately.

You can help us to maintain the database in two different ways. Use this form to suggest we add an article to the site, no matter how old; as long as it's Mars-related we will add it! If you spot a broken link somewhere, please use this form to report it.

MarsNews.com's NewsWire Database is now the most comprehensive public resource for news and information about Mars missions and topics. Utilizing the NewsWire Database as well as our Mission Overviews and Focus Pages, you can quickly learn about any Mars-related topic.

Other services such as Lexis-Nexus offer similar features, for a fee. MarsNews.com is and will remain a free public resource, supported by our readers. If we can make improvements in any way, please contact us.

Thanks for continuing to visit MarsNews.com. This is YOUR website!

We have migrated another 1100 news articles into the NewsWire Database. We now have over 2100 stories in 24 different categories, such as Mars Pathfinder and TransHab inflatable structures. There are another 2300 stories we are checking for broken links. Once that's done we will add them into the database to bring it up to around 4500-5000 total news articles, by far the largest public collection of news about Mars on this planet!

We have also made some improvements to the Event Calendar, and are continuing work on the Image of the Day feature, which will debut soon, in partnership with What on Mars.

Thanks for visiting MarsNews.com!

Five years ago on March 5th, 1999, MarsNews.com was begun by James Burk and Dustin Green to provide the latest news and information about the planet Mars. To celebrate the fifth anniversary of MarsNews.com, we are launching this redesigned website with lots of new information and special features.

I have written an Overview of the Redesign which describes in detail all of the new sections of the website. You may also be interested in reading about the History of MarsNews.com.

Around a thousand articles are present in the new NewsWire Database. In our efforts to eliminate all the broken links from the old system, we have not yet moved over the approximately 3,000 articles remaining. We will be working to do so over the next couple of weeks. But, as you may imagine, fixing all those links has proven to be a big job!

We also have not yet finished the "Image of the Day" feature, which we will use in partnership with What On Mars. It should be ready in a few days, and we will begin providing daily a selected image of interest.

Please explore the new site and contact us if you have any questions or comments. Also let us know if you spot any broken links or something that doesn't appear to be working correctly.