What's New

A new Mars movie clip gives us a rover's-eye view of a bluish Martian sunset, while another clip shows the silhouette of the moon Phobos passing in front of the sun.
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NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, will shoot a laser at rocks and patches of soil with enough power to generate a flash revealing each target's atomic ingredients.
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NASA's Mars Opportunity rover is getting important tips from an orbiting spacecraft as it explores areas that might hold clues about past Martian environments.
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NASA's Mars Odyssey, which launched in 2001, will break the record Wednesday for longest-serving spacecraft at the Red Planet.
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By the middle of next week, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will have worked longer at Mars than any other spacecraft in history.
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By the middle of next week, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will have worked longer at Mars than any other spacecraft in history.
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Thousands of new Mars images from 340 observations by the highest resolution camera orbiting the Red Planet include scenes of rimless pits, mud volcanoes and other features.
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More than one million people have watched assembly and testing of NASA's next Mars rover via a live webcam since it went online in October.
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As it explores a region of Mars, NASA's rover Curiosity will monitor temperatures, winds, humidity and other environmental variables using tools supplied by Spain.
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has visited and photographed two craters informally named for the spacecraft that carried men to the moon 41 years ago this week.
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A camera installed this month on the robotic arm of NASA's next Mars rover will do close-up inspections for clues to Martian environments, but it can look far away, too.
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One of the experiments on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will measure the natural radiation environment to aid plans for future human missions.
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The project team that built and operates the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity has become the first NASA space mission to use cloud computing for daily mission operations.
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Light-colored mounds of a mineral deposited on a volcanic cone more than three billion years ago may preserve evidence of one of the most recent habitable microenvironments on Mars.
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A growing bounty of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals that the timing of new activity in one type of the enigmatic gullies on Mars implicates carbon-dioxide frost, rather than water, as the agent causing fresh flows of sand.
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The ground where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became stuck last year holds evidence that water, perhaps as snow melt, trickled into the subsurface fairly recently and on a continuing basis.
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NASA has selected United Launch Services, LLC of Littleton, Colo., to launch the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft known as MAVEN. MAVEN will launch in November 2013 aboard an Atlas V 401 rocket from Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.
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A newly installed webcam is giving the public an opportunity to watch technicians assemble and test the next NASA Mars rover, one of the most technologically challenging interplanetary missions ever designed.
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The new project manager for the longest-working spacecraft currently active at Mars, NASA's Mars Odyssey, has a long track record himself.
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A suite of instruments to analyze samples of Martian rocks and soil for chemistry relevant to life is being readied in Maryland for NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity.
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The effort, known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission, will explore the past climate of Mars, including its potential for harboring life over the ages.
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NASA's mission to investigate the mystery of how Mars lost much of its atmosphere has won approval for development, and will move toward a 2013 launch.
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In preparation for NASA's next rover landing on the Red Planet, one Mars year away, an instrument studying the Martian atmosphere from orbit has begun a campaign.
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A tool newly delivered from Los Alamos National Laboratory for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will zap Martian rocks with a laser to learn the rocks' makeup.
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A dark rock about the size of a toaster oven is visible in images NASA's Mars rover Opportunity took on Sept. 16. It may be a meteorite. The rover is going for a closer look.
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NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter resumed observing Mars with its science instruments on Sept. 18, recovering from an unplanned reboot of its computer three days earlier.
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NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter put itself into a precautionary standby mode after experiencing a spontaneous computer reboot on Sept. 15. The mission's ground team has begun restoring the spacecraft to full operations.
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Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory put Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, through an obstacle course to test its mobility system.
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Tests underway in a JPL clean room will refine the precision of movements by a robotic arm that can reach more than 7 feet in front of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.
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Mars Science Laboratory, aka Curiosity, is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term program of robotic exploration of the Red Planet. The mission is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in late 2011, and arrive at an intriguing region of Mars in August 2012.
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The rover for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, Curiosity, exercised its mobility system by driving over raised ramps in recent testing at JPL.
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Instruments on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander included the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, right, which analyzed the atmosphere, as well as soil samples.
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During a long drive on Labor Day, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reached the estimated halfway point of its journey from Victoria Crater to Endeavour Crater.
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Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover that will be on Mars two years from now, has been flexing the robotic arm that spacecraft workers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory attached to the rover body in August 2010.
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Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life.
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One of the instruments on a 2016 mission to orbit Mars will provide daily profiles of the changing structure of the planet's atmosphere.
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Thrust from a Titan 3/Centaur rocket launched NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft on a 505-million-mile journey to Mars on Aug. 20, 1975. Viking 2 followed three weeks later.
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The most powerful telescopic camera ever to orbit Mars reveals a fresh crater, an ice mound, climate-recording layers and many other views in 314 newly released observations.
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NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has a new project manager: Phil Varghese, who has managed another veteran NASA Mars mission – the Mars Odyssey orbiter – since 2004.
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NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have embarked on a joint program to explore Mars in the coming decades and selected the five science instruments for the first mission.
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NASA mission controllers have not heard from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit since March 22, and the rover is facing its toughest challenge yet – trying to survive the harsh Martian winter.
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has photographed its first dust devil, a challenging feat in the area where Opportunity is working.
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Like proud parents savoring their baby’s very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time.
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Talk about a growth-spurt. In one week, Curiosity grew by approximately 1 meter (3.5 feet) when spacecraft technicians and engineers attached the rover’s neck and head (called the Remote Sensing Mast) to its body.
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A camera aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has helped develop the most accurate global Martian map ever. Researchers and the public can access the map via several websites and explore and survey the entire surface of the Red Planet.
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NASA's Mars Odyssey returned to full operations on July 23. The orbiter's science camera, and two neutron detectors are working normally. Relays of communications from the Mars rover Opportunity have resumed.
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A downward-pointing camera on the front-left side of NASA's Curiosity rover will give adventure fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars.
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The wheels that will touch down on Mars in 2012 are several rotations closer to spinning on the rocky trails of Mars.
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NASA and Microsoft Research are bringing Mars to life with new features in the WorldWide Telescope software that provide viewers with a high-resolution 3-D map of the Red Planet.
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Six of them! And these wheels aren’t meant for the concrete roadways, bustling freeways, or sleepy highways - they’re destined for off-roading on Mars.
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NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, is sitting pretty on a set of spiffy new wheels that would be the envy of any car show on Earth.

The wheels and a suspension system were added this week by spacecraft technicians and engineers. These new and important touches are a key step in assembling and testing the flight system in advance of a planned 2011 launch.
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A super-resolution view toward Endeavour Crater from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows discernible features in the rim of that long-term destination.
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NASA's Curiosity rover, coming together for a late 2011 launch to Mars, has a newly installed component: a key onboard X-ray instrument for helping the mission achieve its goals.
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Minerals in northern Mars craters seen by two orbiters suggest that a phase in Mars' early history with conditions favorable to life occurred globally, not just in the south.
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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.
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Almost 40 years ago, NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft relayed to Earth the first video images of Mars' northern polar ice cap, revealing a strange pattern of spiral swirls that has puzzled scientists ever since. Using new data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), researchers have finally uncovered the secrets of the troughs that snake through the ice cap like a spiraled maze.
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Engineers have finished a key step in testing the radar system for NASA's next mission to Mars, using helicopter flights at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif.
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Six hundred recent observations of the Mars landscape from an orbiting telescopic camera include scenes of sinuous gullies, geometrical ridges and steep cliffs.
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Rocks examined by NASA's Spirit Mars Rover hold evidence of a wet, non-acidic ancient environment that may have been favorable for life. Confirming this mineral clue took four years of analysis by several scientists.
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Data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have helped scientists solve a pair of mysteries dating back four decades and provided new information about climate change on the Red Planet.
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NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander has ended operations after repeated, unsuccessful attempts to contact the lander, and a new orbiter image shows signs of ice damage to Phoenix.
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For optimal communications during arrival at Mars, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, will launch after Thanksgiving 2011 and land on Mars in August 2012.
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project will pass a historic Martian longevity record on Thursday, May 20.
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From May 17 to 21, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will conduct a fourth and final campaign to check on whether the Phoenix Mars Lander has come back to life.
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When some Mars explorers learned of plans for a worldwide photography event combining shots taken from thousands of different locations on May 2, 2010, they figured, "Why just one world?"
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New images from more than 750 recent observations of Mars by an orbiting telescopic camera testify to the diversity of landscapes there.
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This movie shows the wheel tracks left by the Opportunity rover as it climbed uphill out of Victoria crater.
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has captured a new view of the rim of Endeavour crater, the rover's destination in a multi-year traverse along the sandy Martian landscape. A portion of the rim about 13 kilometers (8 miles) away appears on the horizon at the left edge of the image.
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NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter heard no signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander when it listened from orbit while passing over Phoenix 60 times last week.
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This spring, engineers are testing a radar system that will serve during the next landing on Mars.
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JPL has received the two cameras for the Mast Camera instrument, the science-imaging workhorse of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, to be launched next year.
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit skipped a planned communication session on March 30 and, as anticipated from recent power-supply projections, has probably entered a low-power hibernation mode.
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The most powerful camera aboard a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has returned the first pictures of locations on the Red Planet suggested by the public.
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The team that operates NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity will receive the 2010 International Space Ops Award for Outstanding Achievement.
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity today surpassed 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) of total driving since it landed on Mars 74 months ago.
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Weird coatings on rocks beside a young Martian crater remain puzzling after a preliminary look at data from examination of the site by NASA's Opportunity rover.
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location.
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New studies of ripples and dunes shaped by the winds on Mars testify to variability on that planet, identifying at least one place where ripples are actively migrating and another where the ripples have been stationary for 100,000 years or more.
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NASA's newest Mars orbiter, completing its fourth year at the Red Planet next week, has just passed a data-volume milestone unimaginable a generation ago and still difficult to fathom: 100 terabits.
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Extensive radar mapping of the middle-latitude region of northern Mars shows that thick masses of buried ice are quite common beneath protective coverings of rubble.
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UPDATED : April 2, 2010 Third Listening Period to Begin Monday, April 5
From April 5 through April 9, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will conduct a third campaign to check whether the Phoenix Mars Lander has come back to life after experiencing a Martian arctic winter it was not designed to survive.
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Mars rover Spirit has tenaciously swept, scraped, and squeezed secrets from the forbidding surface of Mars for 6 years. If Spirit can make it through to spring, the feisty robot will prove it's still in the game--by solving the mysteries of the Martian core.
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NASA's Mars Odyssey began a second campaign Monday to check on whether the Phoenix Mars Lander has revived itself after the northern Martian winter. The orbiter received no signal from the lander during the first 10 overflights of this campaign.
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While the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity do not carry a microphone, these audio excerpts represent the journeys the Mars rovers have made while driving across the plains, mountains and craters of Mars during the last six years.
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Design a Sport for Mars and Win a Trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Kids Science Challenge, with support from NASA's Imagine Mars Project, is asking students in grades 3 through 6 to consider what sports might be played by members of the first martian community.
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A dramatic 3D Mars view based on terrain modeling from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data shows "highs and lows" of Mojave Crater.
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Near the center of a Martian crater about the size of Connecticut, hundreds of exposed rock layers form a mound as tall as the Rockies and reveal a record of major environmental changes on Mars billions of years ago.
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Engineers just completed the first end-to-end test for Curiosity's robotic arm and sampling tools, "flexing" the arm to see if it plays "nice" with the rest of the system.
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Name: Spirit, Mars Exploration Rover A
Address: "Troy," 14.6 degrees South, 175.5 degrees East, Gusev Crater, Mars, 4th Rock from the Sun
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NASA's Mars exploration rover Opportunity is allowing scientists to get a glimpse deep inside Mars.
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The rover team has begun driving Spirit backward as next technique for attempting to extricate the rover from the sand trap where it is embedded.
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UPDATED: January 21, 2010
January Listening Period Ends with No Word from Phoenix Mars Lander

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has completed all 30 relay overflights of the Phoenix landing site that were scheduled for Jan. 18 to 21, and heard nothing from the lander.
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The most powerful camera aboard a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars will soon be taking photo suggestions from the public.
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Dunes of sand-sized materials have been trapped on the floors of many Martian craters. This view shows dunes inside a crater in Noachis Terra, west of the giant Hellas impact basin in Mars' southern hemisphere.
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The list of remaining maneuvers being considered for extricating Spirit is becoming shorter.
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Beginning Jan. 18, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will listen for possible, though improbable, radio transmissions from the Phoenix Mars Lander, which completed five months of studying an arctic Martian site in November 2008.
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Martian landforms shaped by winds, water, lava flow, seasonal icing and other forces are analyzed in 21 journal reports based on data from a camera orbiting Mars.
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A new Mars mission will be checking whether a carefully chosen area of Mars has ever had an environment favorable for the development of life and preservation of evidence about life.
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