MARS - BIO FUEL DAILY

NASA's Curiosity Views First 'Sun Rays' on Mars

Mar 07, 2023 (JPL)

Curiosity captured the scene during the rover's newest twilight cloud survey, which builds on its 2021 observations of noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds. Wh...

Solid-gas carbonate formation during dust events on Mars

Mar 06, 2023 (SPX)

Carbonates are general products of aqueous processes on Earth. For Mars, carbonate minerals have been considered a sink for an early dense CO2 atmosphere. Orbit...

SAM Wants More Sample: Sol 3762

Mar 06, 2023 (JPL)

We started planning today at 10am PST due to the timing of our orbital passes above Gale crater, which can sometimes mean a pretty long day for the tactical pla...

Sols 3759-3761: More Analyses of the Tapo Caparo Drill Sample

Mar 03, 2023 (JPL)

The focus of the 3-sol weekend plan is to drop off some sample to SAM, and then perform an Evolved Gas Analysis (EGA) - which involves heating up the sample to ...

Got Rock Sample: Sol 3755

Mar 01, 2023 (JPL)

First, Mastcam will acquire a 2-frame stereo mosaic of the steep, sandy "Rio Unini" surface at the base of Chenapau to search for possible changes since it was ...

Perseverance from Team Curiosity: Sols 3752-3754

Mar 01, 2023 (JPL)

Our modeling tools worked extra hard on Drill Sol 2 plans, so we kept things moving early in the day. Since we've planned Drill Sol 2 four other times in the pa...

Sol 3756: Sit back and wait for the data to roll in

Feb 28, 2023 (JPL)

We still have plenty of science activities to plan but none that involved the Rover Planners, so they were released early to work strategic activities like, for...

SuperCam's AI capabilities enhanced with AEGIS upgrade

Feb 24, 2023 (JPL)

Now, after spending nearly 6 weeks creating the Three Forks sample depot, the rover is back on the road again. Our destination is a location that scientists hav...

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft remains in safe mode after IMU issue

Feb 24, 2023 (JPL)

On Feb. 17, MAVEN exited safe mode and is currently operating in all stellar mode, which does not rely on IMU measurements and allows the IMU to be powered off ...

Drilling the Marker Band Again: Sols 3750-3751

Feb 22, 2023 (JPL)

We are interested generally to see how this compares to the "rippled" Marker Band material that we tried to drill over the past several months, but specifically...

Better tools needed to determine ancient life on Mars

Feb 22, 2023 (SPX)

In a paper published in Nature Communications, visiting planetary scientist Alberto Fairen, and an international team of researchers, claim that ancient organic...

Another Busy Day on Mars: Sol 3749

Feb 21, 2023 (JPL)

After the drive, Curiosity's wheel scuffed the rippled sand feature right in front of us, which you can see in the image above. This scuff - nicknamed 'Taracua'...

Perseverance set to begin third year on Mars at Jezero Crater

Feb 20, 2023 (JPL)

"Anniversaries are a time of reflection and celebration, and the Perseverance team is doing a lot of both," said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley of Ca...

Sols 3744-3745: The One That Got Away

Feb 20, 2023 (JPL)

Unfortunately these rocks do not want to cooperate - they're hard and they weather into resistant and recessive beds which make them very challenging to drill. ...

Study quantifies global impact of electricity in dust storms on Mars

Feb 17, 2023 (SPX)

When dust particles rub against each other, as they do in Martian dust storms, they can become electrified, transferring positive and negative electric charge i...

When data show up late: Sols 3746-3748

Feb 17, 2023 (JPL)

Why that late? Most days, we start an hour earlier, at 8 am in Pasadena California, not 9 am, like today. Today, we only got data that we required for the plann...

NASA study seeks to understand impact effects on Mars rocks

Feb 16, 2023 (SPX)

"Because we're counting on these samples to reveal a record of Mars' geologic past, it would be important for us to understand if and how the rocks have been al...

Hope probe to move to a new Mars orbit and observe deimos

Feb 16, 2023 (SPX)

The new historical move will allow the Hope Probe to transition into a new elliptic orbit around Mars, following a Lambert orbital transfer maneuver utilizing t...

Perseverance shows off collection of Mars samples

Feb 15, 2023 (JPL)

Even space robots know what "pics or it didn't happen" means: NASA's Perseverance Mars rover provided a panorama of its recently completed sample depot - a big ...

Complex subsurface of Mars imaged by Chinese rover Zhurong

Feb 15, 2023 (SPX)

The Zhurong rover was sent to Mars as part of China's Tianwen-1 mission. Launched in July 2020, the rover landed on the surface on 15 May 2021. The rover was se...