Mars Planet

NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched, space agency officials said Thursday.

After six highly successful years of exploring the red sands of Mars, NASA's rover Spirit will rove no more. With its six wheels stuck in powdery sand and two wheels no longer working at all, the resilient little explorer will become an immobile scientific observatory -- if it can survive the harsh temperatures of the upcoming winter. "Its driving days are likely over," Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said in a telephone news conference Tuesday.

The first chemistry results from Mars' northern plain reveal an environment more hospitable to life than some scientists had predicted, one that might allow future colonists to grow crops as familiar on Earth as asparagus and green beans. Strawberries, though, might be tougher, Phoenix mission scientists said Thursday. "We're flabbergasted by this data," said Sam Kounaves, the lead scientist for the wet chemistry experiment on the Phoenix spacecraft, which landed May 25 on Mars.

Caves were some of the earliest refuges for human beings on Earth. Could the same be true for future pioneers on Mars? Glen Cushing, a space scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, thinks so. He said he has found evidence of an extensive cave system among ancient volcanoes at Mars' equator. Using images from spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet, Cushing discovered a series of "collapse depressions" in extinct lava flows from the Arsia Mons volcano, near the equator. Twelve miles high and 270 miles across, Arsia Mons is Mars' second-largest volcano.

Japan successfully launched its first interplanetary probe to Mars on a mission that hopes to gather further evidence on whether the Red Planet could once have been warm enough to support life. The launch of the probe, known as Planet-B, by Japan's most powerful rocket takes the country into an elite space club; only the United States and Russia have previously sent out interplanetary spacecraft.

An international team of scientists will soon journey to southern France where the first passengers were carried aloft 205 years ago in a lighter-than-air flying machine. The scientists will unfurl a large, paper-thin balloon, and if luck is with them, they will bring about the marriage of the fanciful art of ballooning with Space Age technology. But their contraption will not carry a sheep, a duck and a rooster. That was the passenger manifest for the historic flight of Sept. 19, 1783.

A rocket carrying the second of two NASA Mars rovers soared into the sky over Cape Canaveral, Fla., Monday night, lighting up the darkness with a glowing orange flare as it began its roughly 300-million-mile journey to the Red Planet. The Boeing Delta II Heavy rocket carrying the 384-pound rover, named Opportunity, lifted off at 11:18 p.m.

When astronomer Percival Lowell gazed through his mountainside telescope at Mars a century ago, he saw cities, patches of vegetation and an intricate network of canals -- features that seemed to indicate vast quantities of water. Lowell, of course, was wrong. But the search for water continues today, driven by the belief that where there is water, there is the possibility of life.

It's a scene that plays over and over in his mind: On the final leg of a mission to Mars, the spacecraft disappears with his experiments on board. It's no fantasy. In fact, three times UCLA planetary scientist David Paige has lost years of work and millions of dollars in equipment on three separate missions to Mars over the last decade. Throughout the weekend, the question lingered: Is he about to relive his worst nightmare?

In a spectacular success for NASA's return to Mars after a 21-year absence, the Pathfinder spacecraft bounced safely off the rocky surface of the Red Planet at just after 10 a.m. on the Fourth of July and coasted to a halt right on target and--more astonishingly--right-side up.

There is much more water on Mars than anyone had thought -- possibly twice as much as in Greenland's ice sheet, scientists said Thursday. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted ice in five recently formed meteorite craters midway between the northern pole and the equator, researchers said in a report in the journal Science. That's the farthest south the underground ice sheet has been found. The spacecraft's instruments were able to confirm that the bluish material inside the crater was, indeed, ice. "Buried ice on Mars is much more extensive than we had thought," Shane Byrne, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, said at a news briefing Thursday at the Jet Propulsion Lab in La Cañada Flintridge.

The long-lived rover Spirit is stuck in the sand on Mars, and controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge are scrambling to find a way to extricate the vehicle before it becomes entombed on the Red Planet. "This is quite serious," said JPL's John Callas, the project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity. "Spirit is in a very difficult situation. We are proceeding methodically and cautiously. It may be weeks before we try moving Spirit again."

Google finally put the world's oceans on the map. During a splashy presentation Monday at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Internet giant unveiled a feature in its Google Earth program that will allow users to swim through undersea canyons as deep as the Mariana Trench and encounter creatures like a critically endangered, prehistoric fish called the coelacanth.

After hearing nothing from the Phoenix spacecraft in more than a week, NASA officials on Monday declared an end to the nearly six-month mission at Mars' north pole, the first to touch and taste the water on an alien planet. Phoenix sent its last message on Nov. 2 before a lack of power caused it to go to sleep -- permanently, it now appears.

The death watch is on for NASA's Phoenix lander, the first spacecraft to sample water on another planet. Buffeted by dust storms and chilled by temperatures as low as minus-141 degrees Fahrenheit from the impending arrival of the Martian winter, Phoenix is clinging to life, but barely, NASA officials said Friday. "We knew this was coming," said project manager Barry Goldstein. "It's bittersweet." Days earlier, Phoenix fell silent, going into safe mode to save battery power.

The latest forecast on Mars calls for morning fog and swift-moving clouds -- along with light snow. The surprising weather report was part of the latest scientific findings from NASA's Phoenix lander, which has been taking measurements at the Martian north pole since May 25.

If there is life on Mars, scientists believe it's likely to be tiny organisms that can survive below the planet's surface, without sunlight or oxygen, nourished by the minerals available even in that harsh environment. In other words, thinks Ricardo Amils Pibernat, a researcher at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, past or present life on the red planet could well resemble the unusual microbes that populate Spain's Rio Tinto.

The Pathfinder spacecraft, poised for its historic descent to the Martian surface today, got close enough to the Red Planet to begin to feel its gravitational attraction at 4 a.m. Thursday. "I think it's safe to say we're all [feeling the pull of Mars]," flight system manager Brian Muirhead said. At 11 a.m. Thursday, the heaters turned on to inflate the air bags that will protect the craft when it hits the surface. By 7:45 p.m., the spacecraft was as close to Mars as the moon is to Earth.

After weeks of testing the soil in the Martian arctic, NASA's Phoenix lander has for the first time confirmed through chemical analysis the presence of water on another planet, scientists said Thursday. Several weeks ago, Phoenix uncovered convincing visual evidence that it had landed on an ice field when it set down on Mars' northern plain May 25.

The first chemistry results from Mars' northern plain reveal an environment more hospitable to life than some scientists had predicted, one that might allow future colonists to grow crops as familiar on Earth as asparagus and green beans. Strawberries, though, might be tougher, Phoenix mission scientists said Thursday. "We're flabbergasted by this data," said Sam Kounaves, the lead scientist for the wet chemistry experiment on the Phoenix spacecraft, which landed May 25 on Mars.