Exploring Mars!

The past few years have been really exciting for Mars exploration. NASA launched the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers in June and July of 2003 and both landed successfully on the planet in January 2004. Both Rovers have far exceeded their original 90-day life spans (by about 7 times, actually!) and have been transmitting valuable scientific data back to their controllers here on Earth- most notably evidence from Opportunity that it's landing site may have once been a lake or a sea.

On August 21st 2005, Spirit ended a year-long climb up the 82-meter high Husband Hill, part of the Columbia Hills range- a truly Herculean feat for the golf-cart sized Rover.


The view from the top, baby!

The "little rover that could" then descended from the hill and in February 2006, arrived at a site called Home Plate (so named because it resembles the home plate of a baseball diamond when seen from orbit) and is now heading towards McCool Hill, now estimated to be the highest hill in the Columbia range.

Meanwhile, Opportunity's been keeping busy too. In January 2005, it discovered Heat Shield Rock- the first meteorite found on another planet! It's since passed by several craters, dug several trenches, gotten stuck in a sand trap, successfully escaped from said trap and is currently studying Erebus Crater. The Rovers have been, and continue to, a remarkable success for NASA- heck, there's even an IMAX movie about them now- but they haven't been resting on their laurels.

I was just watching a video of a talk given by Pete Theisinger, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover project, at the Computer History Musuem. During the talk, he described the challenges he and his team faced in developing the two Rovers in just three years (it's quite fascinating to watch!) and along the way, he related that in 2000, NASA had initiated two competing pre-projects- the Rover and and an Orbiter pre-project. Of course, the Rover project went ahead first- the Orbiter project was pushed back.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as it is now known, launched in August 2005 and on 10 March, 2006, successfully put itself in orbit around Mars! It's equipped with the most powerful telescopic camera ever flown on a planetary mission and should provide us with the most detailed views of the planet's surface we've ever seen.

While we wait for the craft to send it's first images of Mars, we can take a look at a new map of the red planet online, courtesy of Google! They launched their new Google Mars site on 13 March 2006 to commemorate the birthday of 19th century astronomer Percival Lowell, who created a map of the planet and was also instrumental in the search for a planet beyond Neptune (Pluto, discovered in 1930, 14 years after his death).