NASA’s Opportunity rover has had an incredible career already, spending years upon years studying the Martian surface and proving to be an incredibly reliable and hardy piece of hardware. Unfortunately, a NASA dust storm that began kicking up in May may have abruptly ended its historic run. In mid-June, the solar-powered Opportunity ran out of …
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory does a lot of work with rovers. The group works tirelessly to keep tabs on all kinds of NASA hardware, including the rovers currently scooting around Mars. Now, in an awesome twist, JPL wants everyone to make their own rovers, and they’re giving you all the instructions and advice to make …
NASA’s Curiosity rover has been doing some fantastic work on Mars, and even though it had to basically reinvent how it uses its primary sampling tool it’s managed to get back to work anyway. Unfortunately for the rover’s handlers, one of the first new targets that they picked to drill into has actually managed to …
We’ve learned an incredible amount of information about Mars in the past two decades, and much of it is thanks to the small fleet of robotic rovers cruising around its surface. We’ve sent the high-priced, high-tech tools to the Red Planet so that they can send data back to us, but in order to truly …
When you get caught in a storm here on Earth you just find shelter for a little while and let it pass, but things are a whole lot different on Mars. It’s now been three weeks since the massive dust storm on Mars has swallowed up NASA’s aging Opportunity rover, and scientists have absolutely no idea …
Mars isn’t a great place to be right now. Well, it’s really never a great place to be, at least not for the past billion years or so, but the past few weeks have been especially rough as a massive dust storm is rapidly swallowing up the planet. The storm has already caused NASA’s Opportunity …
It’s only been a few days since NASA held a highly-anticipated press briefing to tell the world that it found organic compounds on Mars that may be a sign of previous life on the planet. That was some pretty incredible news with potentially history-making implications, but the impromptu teleconference NASA just scheduled for later today …
With so much interest in what NASA’s Curiosity rover has been up to recently — with the whole “maybe finding evidence of life” and whatnot — it’s easy to forget that it isn’t the only rover making tracks on the Red Planet. Opportunity, the much older rover that has been on Mars since early 2004, …
When you’re doing some home improvements and a tool breaks it can be a pretty frustrating experience. I mean you have to go all the way to the hardware store for a replacement, and have you seen the parking situation at Home Depot? Forget it, that door hinge can stay broken, I’m going to watch …
With the increasingly steady stream of Mars-related news over the past couple of years it can be easy to forget that NASA has had high-tech hardware rolling around on the planet’s surface for quite a while now. We got a great reminder of that today, as NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover is celebrating its 2,000th Martian …
