by Patrick Woida
Well the good news is the Phoenix Team is going to "stand down" for July 3rd & 4th. The Phoenix herself will still be hard at work on the surface of Mars beaming more images back to Earth. There will be a few of us in to be sure she's all right, and I'll be looking in on the new pictures (come on, where else would I be).

It's nice a few of us coming in can give this hard working team a couple days off after more than a month on Mars (and Mars time). Yesterday I went full circle ...

How Robots Could Explore Other Worlds
FOXNews - 11 hours ago
A demonstration of how such a surface explorer might deploy will take place in the Mars Science Laboratory mission, slated for a 2009 launch. ...

Will we reach Mars?
RIA Novosti, Russia - 1 hour ago
Because a mission to Mars would last years, it is necessary to develop a special, expensive LSS, a kind of an autonomous regenerative model with closed ...

Nature.com (subscription)
Jealous Mars spacecraft raises game
Nature.com (subscription), UK - Jul 2, 2008
Coupled with the data that Phoenix is digging up, further north, it looks like Mars is going to be spewing up data for us to devour for a while yet.

PhysOrg.com
Mars Sample Return: The next step in exploring the Red Planet
PhysOrg.com, VA - 12 hours ago
Artist's view of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) ascent module lifting off from Mars' surface with the Martian soil samples. Credits: ESA ESA and the Centre ...
Details of international Mars sample return mission emerge Flight International
all 8 news articles

Details of international Mars sample return mission emerge
Flight International - 2 hours ago
By Rob Coppinger Flight has obtained details of the international Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission architecture that is to be presented at a European Space ...

The next sample delivered to NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) will be ice-rich.

A team of engineers and scientists assembled to assess TEGA after a short circuit was discovered in the instrument has concluded that another short circuit could occur when the oven is used again.

“Since there is no way to assess the probability of another short circuit occurring, we are taking the most conservative approach and treating the next sample to TEGA as possibly our last,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator.

A sample taken from the trench informally named “Snow White” that was in Phoenix’s robotic arm’s scoop earlier this week likely has dried out, so the soil particles are to be delivered to the lander’s optical microscope on Thursday, and if material remains in the scoop, the rest will be deposited in the Wet Chemistry Laboratory, possibly early on Sunday.

There were jokes about the (very rare, of course) moments when Cornell's central administration is a lot like, well, a Martian dust storm. And there was commiserating about the aches and pains that come with age -- for humans and Mars rovers alike.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander enlarged the "Snow White" trench and scraped up little piles of icy soil on Saturday, June 28, the 33rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Scientists say that the scrapings are ideal for the lander's analytical instruments.

The robotic arm on Phoenix used the blade on its scoop to make 50 scrapes in the icy layer buried under subsurface soil. The robotic arm then heaped the scrapings into a few 10- to 20-cubic centimeter piles, or piles each containing between two and four teaspoonfuls. Scraping created a grid about two millimeters deep.

The scientists saw the scrapings in Surface Stereo Imager images on Sunday, June 29, agreed they had "almost perfect samples of the interface of ice and soil," and commanded the robotic arm to pick up some scrapings for instrument analysis.

GOLDEN, Colorado — NASA's Opportunity Mars rover is getting an eyeful, wheeling itself ever closer to a cliff wall that's part of the huge Victoria Crater. A camera campaign is underway, with early imagery producing anticipation within the rover science team back on Earth.

A bloom of microbes detected near a crumbling underwater crater suggests that early Mars may have also hosted life in subsurface areas struck by asteroids.

Hey, I’ll bet you didn’t notice, but the IAS Viewer has been upgraded to version 3.1.2.

One important feature enhancement is that the auto-stretch preference is now “sticky.” You can disable auto-stretch once and for all, as indicated in the screenshots below.

With this change, you can load our images and see them in the original stretch, while still having the ability to re-stretch within higher-resolution areas.

Work at local company could enable space exploration Work being done at a small, local tech company may eventually enable the first manned mission to Mars, and allow astronauts to breathe there.

AFP
Buzz Aldrin: Invest in Nasa to beat the Chinese to Mars
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom - Jun 28, 2008
... the leadership of human exploration. "We can do wonderful science on the Moon, and wonderful commercial things. Then we can pack up and move on to Mars."
Packing for a Mars trip The News Journal
Moonman wants US to regain space dominance Calgary Herald
US losing the space race, warns Aldrin Irish Independent
AFP - The Huntsville Times - al.com
all 16 news articles

Beware of the Mars hoax
Asheville Citizen-Times, NC - 19 hours ago
27 approaches, beware of the Mars Hoax. Astronomers at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) point out that on Aug. 27, 2003, the orbits of both ...

Despite being several years into our mission, we’re still seeing fresh faces on the HiRISE team. Recently we’ve added some new hires: student validators, researchers, and Targeting Specialists (with whom I work the most). We also continue to involve new scientists in operations - Participating Scientists or post-docs who haven’t gone through the planning process before. They come to HiROC to train during their first cycle, so we have a conveyor belt of visiting scientists as well.

The first Monday in June when they all started was krazy - lots of new people wandering around, office chaos and computer confusion…. By now they’re settling in and things are cooling down somewhat, although at least for the Targeting Specialists, we consider it about a 6-month process to get fully up to speed. In the first few weeks, their eyes are usually glazed over with information overload. At this point, they probably feel like they’ve been dropped in the hot oil of confusion (it’s also 106F in Tucson, which doesn’t help), then dipped in sticky, overly detailed procedures. Sweet procedures….

While we go through this training, the new kids are keeping us veterans on our toes - I keep finding places where the procedures we told them to follow are unclear, there’s a hole in the middle where steps are missing, outdated, or just plain wrong! So it’s really a shared learning experience. Besides, it’s always good to have some fresh, hot ideas and different perspectives to keep us from getting jaded. or dangerously skinny.

I’m excited for them - the sugary thrill when their first commands execute on the spacecraft, the pride when their first beautiful images come down, the feeling of fullness and mastery when they finally become fluent in the foreign language of acronyms…. Other firsts I’m sure they’re not looking forward to are their first mistake, their first late night, their first bad image…. So not everything is warm with honeyed nostalgia.

I’m sure they’ll all do a wonderful job, though, and be valuable additions to the team. In the meantime, though, I could really use some donuts…. Welcome, newbies!

Phoenix chemistry set discovers that Mars's soil is like Antarctica's.

The discovery last week of water ice just under the surface of Mars has researchers buzzing. The finding, by the Phoenix Mars Lander, is the most recent hint that the Red Planet might be habitable to microbes.

The next lunar rocket, Ares V, will be 38 stories tall and ready for passengers in 2020. Scheduled for completion in 2020, the lunar program may be a first step in getting to Mars.

Two bright planets will approach each other in our evening sky during the next couple of weeks. They are Mars, which was so brilliant during the Christmas season of 2007 and has since diminished dramatically in brightness, and Saturn, which has adorned our evening sky since midwinter.