Astronomy, Mars | featured news

US and European efforts to send joint missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018 are slowed by an inability on the part of the Americans to provide a full financial commitment to the projects.

Think Mars today is a hostile place? It was worse 600,000 years ago, according to new research that suggests the planet had a dustier, stormier atmosphere. “It was an unpleasant place to hang out,” said lead researcher Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute. He said Mars’ climate was probably a lot like the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s — but a lot worse.

The crew of a simulated international Mars mission took their first steps on an indoor Red Planet landscape on Monday, marking the halfway point in an ambitious 520-day isolation experiment to test the strains of interplanetary travel.

NASA's next-generation rover mission to the surface of Mars needs more money – again. Nine months before the scheduled launch, the space agency says the mission has burned through its reserves and needs another $82 million to complete testing before liftoff.

Towards the end of 2011 a large and hugely expensive robotic rover called Curiosity is due to blast off for Mars from Cape Canaveral. If it makes it safely to the planet’s surface in August 2012 one of the first things it will do is sniff the air. Its creators, back on Earth, will be straining to see if that air carries a whiff of methane.

Invoking the spirit of "Star Trek" in a scholarly article entitled "To Boldly Go," two scientists contend human travel to Mars could happen much more quickly and cheaply if the missions are made one-way. They argue that it would be little different from early settlers to North America, who left Europe with little expectation of return.

Jupiter and Mars aren't the only recent impact victims in our solar system. In two talks today at the Division for Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California, astronomers report that a small asteroid located in the inner asteroid belt between those two planets took a major hit early last year.

Thirty-four years after NASA's Viking missions to Mars sent back results interpreted to mean there was no organic material - and consequently no life - on the planet, new research has concluded that organic material was found after all.

New images of an ancient crater on Mars look just like a bootprint -- and the high res pics have failed to solve the age-old mystery for planetary scientists. If anything, the high-resolution images of the "Footprint Crater" -- otherwise known as Orcus Patera -- have puzzled Mars-watchers even further as to how the Red Planet was originally scarred with the 240-mile-long depression.

California 7th graders discovered this Martian pit feature at the center of the superimposed red square in this image while participating in a program that enables students to use the camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.