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Explanation: This moon is doomed. Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. These martian moons may well be captured asteroids originating in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or perhaps from even more distant reaches of our Solar System. The larger moon, Phobos, is indeed seen to be a cratered, asteroid-like object in this stunning color image from the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with objects as small as 10 meters visible. But Phobos orbits so close...

Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are getting ready for a Windows 98 upgrade on an orbiter circling Mars. The Mars Express spacecraft has been operating for more than 19 years, and the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument onboard has been using software built using Windows 98. Thankfully for humanity and the Red Planet’s sake, the ESA isn’t upgrading its systems to Windows ME. The MARSIS instrument on ESA’s Mars Express was key to the discovery of a huge underground aquifer of liquid water on the Red Planet in 2018. This major new software...

There's trash in the deepest ocean depths, at some 35,700 feet beneath the surface. There's also trash on Mars. While looking for hints of past microbial Martian life, NASA's Perseverance rover recently spotted landing debris caught in a jagged rock. It's thermal material the space agency used to protect the Perseverance spacecraft from extreme temperatures as it journeyed to Mars and plummeted through the Martian atmosphere. "My team has spotted something unexpected: It’s a piece of a thermal blanket that they think may have come from my descent stage, the rocket-powered jet pack that set me down on landing day...

#Date (UTC)Duration (sec) AltitudeDistanceMax Ground SpeedRoute Summary29 June 11, 2022 at 15:06[74][6] (Sol 465) 66.6 10 m (33 ft) 179 m (587 ft) 5.50 m/s (12.3 mph) Shift northwest to land at Airfield U First flight without the use of its inclinometer, and in the cold of winter as well.[75]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ingenuity_flights

NASA's Curiosity rover has a knack for snapping eye-opening pictures of the Gale Crater on Mars. There was the (actually very small) "doorway" recently and then a facelike cliff last year. The latest "wow, look at that" image to come to my attention shows two delicate, gravity-defying formations reaching upward from the dusty Martian surface. The SETI Institute -- a research organization focused on searching for life in the universe -- highlighted the image in a tweet last week, calling it a "cool rock." SETI offered a possible explanation for the fantastical shapes: "The spikes are most likely the cemented...

Five planets will be visible in the predawn sky this weekend, offering an opportunity for sky watchers to see a rare alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with the naked eye. Beginning Friday and lasting through this month, the five planets will appear strung across the eastern horizon before sunrise. The parade of planets will be aligned in order of their distance from the sun, with Mercury, closest to the star, appearing lowest on the horizon and Saturn highest in the night sky. For the best views, sky watchers in the Northern Hemisphere should head outside roughly 30...

Billions of years ago, a river flowed across this scene in a Mars valley called Mawrth Vallis. A new study examines the tracks of Martian rivers to see what they can reveal about the history of the planet’s water and atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL Caltech/University of Arizona Mars once ran red with rivers. The telltale tracks of past rivers, streams and lakes are visible today all over the planet. But about three billion years ago, they all dried up—and no one knows why. "People have put forward different ideas, but we're not sure what caused the climate to change so dramatically,"...

This image was taken by Mast Camera (Mastcam) onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 3466 (2022-05-07 07:58:16 UTC).Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA’s InSight Mars lander has detected the largest quake ever observed on another planet: an estimated magnitude 5 temblor that occurred on May 4, 2022, the 1,222nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This adds to the catalog of more than 1,313 quakes InSight has detected since landing on Mars in November 2018. The largest previously recorded quake was an estimated magnitude 4.2 detected Aug. 25, 2021. InSight was sent to Mars with a highly sensitive seismometer, provided by France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), to study the deep interior of the planet. As seismic waves pass through or...

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover's mast. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU. Download image ›On Thursday, May 5, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory received confirmation that the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter had re-established communications with the Perseverance rover. Earlier in the week, the rotorcraft had missed a planned communications session with the rover – for the first time in over a year of operations on the Mars surface. Ingenuity relies on Perseverance as the base station that enables it to send data to and...

The Mars program is being held up (and costing way too much) for two reasons: 1. Enviro-wackos in NASA who have enough influence to demand redundant sterile systems on the spacecraft to MAKE SURE we do not send a harmful microbe to Mars on the trip. Never mind that the atmosphere there would kill said microorganisms, negating any gratitude from anything on Mars for the effort to prevent exposing it/them. 2. Many of the parts and assemblies, by demand from the racially pure leftists involved in the project, must be ordered from women/minority/approved (not white male) companies and that is...

#MarsHelicopter can’t stop, won’t stop! Ingenuity completed its 26th flight on the one-year anniversary of its first flight on Mars. It took these four images during the flight with its navigation camera.(Image gif at above source link)***Flight -- 26 Sol -- 414 Date -- April 19, 2022 Horizontal Distance -- 360m ~ 1,181ft Max.Altitude -- 8m ~ 26ft Max. Groundspeed -- 3.80 m/s ~ 8.5 mph Duration -- 159.0 sec Route of Flight -- From Airfield Q To Airfield RComplete chart at:https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Flight-Log

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera to shoot video of Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons, eclipsing the Sun. It’s the most zoomed-in, highest-frame-rate observation of a Phobos solar eclipse ever taken from the Martian surface. ==> CLICK HERE to see a 49 second YouTube video of the eclipseThe Mastcam-Z camera recorded video of Phobos, one of the Red Planet’s two moons, to study how its orbit is changing over time. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has captured dramatic footage of Phobos, Mars’ potato-shaped moon, crossing the face of the Sun. These observations can help scientists better understand the...

Ingenuity aced its "Wright Brothers moment" a year ago — and it's still going strong. One year ago today (April 19), an aircraft flew on a world beyond Earth for the first time ever. That history-making vehicle is NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which landed inside the Red Planet's Jezero Crater with the life-hunting, sample-caching Perseverance rover on Feb. 18, 2021. Just over two months later, the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity made its first foray into the Martian skies, hovering about 10 feet (3 meters) above the red dirt of a site named, appropriately enough, Wright Brothers Field. With that 39-second...

FlightSolDateHorizontal DistanceMax. AltitudeMax. GroundspeedDuration Route of Flight mftmftm/smphsecondsFromTo25403 April 8, 2022 704 ~2,310 10 ~33 5.50 ~12.3 161.3 Airfield PAirfield Q Wikipedia:#Date (UTC)Duration (Sec)AltitudeDistanceMax Groud SpeedRouteSummary25April 8, 2022 at 16:40[163] (Sol 403) 161.3 10 m (33 ft) 708.43 m (2,324.2 ft) 5.50 m/s (12.3 mph) Shift northwest flying across northwest Seìtah and crossing the Seìtah region to land at the staging area at Airfield Q 18.45477°N 77.43058°EThe flight was the longest and traveled at the highest rate of speed so far. The mission team chose a route that avoided flying over hardware that was discarded and fell to the surface...

The #MarsHelicopter completed its 24th flight on April 3. Now, Ingenuity is gearing up for Flight 25, which includes traveling 704 meters northwest – about 80 meters longer than the record-breaking Flight 9. Learn more about this intricate plan:Balancing Risks in the 'Séítah' Region - Flight 24

NASA's InSight lander arrived in November 2018 and started listening for Mars' heartbeat, we learnt something really remarkable: Mars is rumbling. To date, InSight has detected hundreds of marsquakes – enough to give us a detailed map of the Martian interior. Tkalčić and his colleague, geophysicist Weijia Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wanted to look for quakes that might have gone unnoticed in the InSight data. They used two unconventional techniques, only recently applied to geophysics, to hunt seismic events in the InSight data. Based on nine templates of known marsquakes, the pair detected 47 new seismic events,...

Fly me to the Moon, let me swim among the starsWater molecules have been detected in soil in one of the Moon's largest sunlit craters, NASA announced on Monday, which means permanent bases on the natural satellite may be potentially a lot easier to support. The discovery was made using a telescope onboard NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) – a modified Boeing 747 capable of flying 45,000 feet above our planet. The airborne 'scope spied what may well be water in the Clavius crater, which is visible from Earth, located in the southern hemisphere, and, coincidentally, the site...

The month starts off with three bright planets clustered low in our east-southeast sky just before sunrise. Venus, Saturn and Mars are within six degrees of separation, but each morning thereafter the configuration noticeably changes. Mars and Saturn approach each other more closely than the apparent diameter of the moon on April 5. A view of the predawn sky on April 19, 2022 in Stellarium shows the alignment of Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn. (Image credit: Stellarium) The main event comes during the final week of April with the approach of magnitude -2 Jupiter to magnitude -4 Venus, seven times...

There are two speeds of sound on Mars — one for high-pitched noises like the zap of a laser and another for lower frequencies like the whir of a helicopter rotor, scientists have revealed. The first audio recordings on the Red Planet were obtained by NASA's Perseverance rover after it landed in February last year and deployed its two microphones. Experts have now given their first analysis of five hours of sound picked up by the rover, which revealed a quiet planet with occasional gusts of wind where two different speeds of sound would have a strange delayed effect on...