In September 2019, NASA started the second half of an epic game of Marco Polo ; early this month the agency declared it over for good.
On Feb. 2, NASA formally ended the Mars Cube One mission. MarCO, as it was known, consisted of two tiny cubesats that hitchhiked along with the agency's InSight lander that reached the Red Planet in November 2018. The twin MarCO satellites were the first cubesats to leave Earth orbit, and they aced their goal of reporting on InSight's perilous landing to scientists on Earth.
In case you are keeping track:
Curious Kids: Why Can't We Put People on Mars? | Space
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Adam Hawkey , Associate Professor, School of Sport, Health and Social Sciences, Solent University
While we haven't yet put people on Mars , we may be able to in the future. As with any major human exploration, whether it's climbing Mount Everest or travelling to the deepest point of the oceans, there will be a number of obstacles to overcome when we send people to Mars (and bring them back home again).
Sol 2688-2689: Into the Unknown – NASA's Mars Exploration Program
Over the last couple of weeks, the Curiosity science team engaged in a series of long debates about where we should go after we completed our analyses of the Hutton sample. Our first option was to drive downhill and rejoin the strategically planned route that skirts the base of the Greenheugh pediment. The second option was to head the other way and drive uphill onto the top of pediment capping unit.
The focus of today’s plan will be to execute the first of several drives that will take us to the top. We don’t expect to encounter slopes much greater than 25˚ in today’s planned drive, but subsequent drives will require the rover to ascend slopes of 30˚ or more. We’ve never driven up slopes this steep with Curiosity before, and we don’t actually know if the rover will be able to make it all the way up and over.
Rocks, Rockets and Robots: The Plan to Bring Mars Down to Earth - Scientific American
In 2031 a cannonball shot from Mars should fall to Earth somewhere in the deserts of the western U.S., allowing scientists to get their hands on what some would consider the most precious materials in human history: pristine geologic samples taken from the surface of another planet.
Decades in the making, this moment would represent the zenith of the robotic Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, an international endeavor involving NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and a consortium of industry partners. But its realization is far from a foregone conclusion.
Not to change the topic here:
SpaceX gets approval to build its Mars spaceship at Port of L.A. - Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles City Council approved a permit Tuesday that allows the Elon Musk-led company to use a site on Terminal Island at the port to build aerospace parts.
SpaceX representatives told L.A. City Councilman Joe Buscaino's office that the company was interested in the port site because it needed additional manufacturing capacity for its Starship spaceship and rocket booster. A SpaceX representative at last week's harbor commissioners meeting did not mention Starship by name during his presentation of the project, but he said the company would use the port site to further its goal of creating an interplanetary society that includes Mars.
Delay seems likely as parachute problems plague European Mars lander | Ars Technica
The European and Russian space agencies have announced they will decide the fate of their ExoMars mission at a meeting on March 12.
The joint mission to deliver a rover and suite of scientific instruments to the surface of the red planet is set for a July on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. However, serious questions were raised about the viability of the lander's complicated parachute systems last year and ongoing problems in testing them.
Starwatch: close encounter between Mars and the moon | Science | The Guardian
News | NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Undergoes Memory Update
From Feb. 17 to Feb. 29, 2020, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will go on hiatus from its science mission and its relay operations while engineers on Earth conduct long-distance maintenance. During the hiatus, other orbiters will relay data from the Mars Curiosity rover and Mars InSight lander to Earth.
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The maintenance work involves updating battery parameters in the spacecraft's flash memory - a rare step that's been done only twice before in the orbiter's 15 years of flight. This special update is necessary because it was recently determined that the battery parameters in flash were out of date and if used, would not charge MRO's batteries to the desired levels.
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