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As NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers resumed reliable contact with Earth, after a period when Mars passed nearly behind the Sun, the space agency extended funding for an additional six months of rover operations, as long as they keep working. Both rovers successfully completed their primary three-month missions on the surface of Mars in April and have already added about five months of bonus exploration during the first extension of their missions. "Spirit and Opportunity appear ready to continue their remarkable adventures," said Andrew Dantzler, solar system division director at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "We're taking advantage of that good news...

The roll off of Opportunity from the lander pad at Meridiani Planum will occur at midnight tonight. JPL NASA will be carried live on NASA TV. JPL reports a 12 AM PST "Opportunity egree live coverage" 4 AM PST : Opportunity egress briefing

1 hour, 49 minutes ago By Leonard David Senior Space Writer, SPACE.com PASADENA, Calif. -- Operators of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity have successfully deployed its wheels and completed the first half of a stand-up process -- all part of readying the rover to do what it was built to do best, rove. If all continues on track, the robot may wheel itself onto the flat and dark terrain of its landing spot, inside a small crater at Meridiani Planum this coming Sunday. That drive is eagerly awaited by scientists gathered here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Within...

NASA memorialized the Apollo 1 crew -- Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee -- by dedicating the hills surrounding the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's landing site to the astronauts. The crew of Apollo 1 perished in flash fire during a launch pad test of their Apollo spacecraft at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., 37 years ago today. "Through recorded history explorers have had both the honor and responsibility of naming significant landmarks," said NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe. "Gus, Ed and Roger's contributions, as much as their sacrifice, helped make our giant leap for mankind possible. Today, as America strides towards...

The crippled Spirit rover remains in critical condition on the surface of Mars, engineers said today, the victim of ongoing electronic seizures that have caused its central computer to reboot itself more than 60 times over the past two days. Engineers successfully coaxed the rover to beam back limited engineering data during two brief communications sessions and they were relieved to discover the spacecraft's power system was providing the necessary life support. But Spirit's state of mind was clearly - and unusually - different in both sessions, ruling out any simple explanations for what might have gone wrong. "We have...

Controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory believe the Mars rover Spirit has placed itself into "safe-mode" after experiencing some sort of problem, and officials remain hopeful that engineers can coax the craft back into operation. "We are cautiously encouraged," JPL director Charles Elachi said on NASA Television a short time ago. "We are still concerned until we understand the problem and we address it." Spirit abruptly stopped relaying its scientific and health data to Earth on Wednesday, sending a streak of fear through Mission Control when the rover went silent. But earlier today, a signal was sent from Earth to...

If you’re marveling over the incredibly detailed pictures of Mars sent back to Earth by Spirit, the Mars Exploration Rover, prepare to be blown away by what you can do with these images right on your own Mac. All you need is Maestro, a scientific visualization tool created by the scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to work with the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. During the 2004 Mars Exploration Rover Mission, you can download a free copy of Maestro for Mac OS X from NASA JPL that allows you to see Mars in ways you’ve never imagined. “It’s actually...

Go To That Crater And Turn Right: Spirit Gets A Travel Itinerary January 13, 2004 NASA's Spirit has begun pivoting atop its lander platform on Mars, and the robot's human partners have announced plans to send it toward a crater, then toward some hills, during the mission. Determining exactly where the spacecraft landed, in the context of images taken from orbit, has given planners a useful map of the vicinity. After Spirit drives off its lander and examines nearby soil and rocks, the scientists and engineers managing it from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., intend to tell it to...

Excerpted from news services: "To grasp the magnitude of what American scientists achieved this past weekend with the successful landing of the robot rover Spirit on Mars, you can't do much better than a TV reporter we heard on Sunday, who likened it to thwacking a golf ball in Los Angeles and having it land on precisely the green you were aiming for -- in New York City. Think about it: Scientists launched the tiny Spirit seven months ago, guided it almost 50 million miles across our solar system, slowed it from 12,000 miles per hour -- that's more than...