International Mars Exploration Working Group (IMEWG) Exploration.esa. MER Special Update 052611 - NASA Ends Spirit Mission. See other posts from May 2011 Posted by A.J.S.
Rayl Topics: mission status, Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity, Spirit The intensified effort to recover Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Spirit came to an end early Wednesday morning Pacific time and NASA has now transitioned the mission to a single-rover operation focused on Spirit's still-active twin, Opportunity. A series of final commands sent through Deep Space Network antennas electronically urged Spirit on its Martian day or Sol 2627 to respond. The end of Spirit’s mission -- which took all of humankind on “the first real overland expedition across another planet,” as Steve Squyres, MER principal investigator, describes it -- has been in the scope for months. Scuttlebutt was that there was an ever-increasing desire among some agency officials at headquarters to pull the plug, so to speak, on Spirit’s mission sooner rather than later. "We always knew we would get to this point," noted John Callas, MER project manager, of JPL.
Mars Exploration Rover Mission Mars Exploration Rover Mission 3D - VRMars - Virtual Reality Software on The Planet Mars. Mars Exploration Program: Program & Missions. Mars Exploration Detailed at Smithsonian's "Air and Space" Mars Exploration Rover 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers - Explore the Cosmos. Mars has historically been unfriendly to Earth’s attempts to visit it.
More missions have been attempted to Mars than to any other place in the Solar System except the Moon, and about half of the attempts have failed. Some of these failures occurred because Mars was the first planet Earth attempted to explore, and the early exploration attempts taught us many lessons that have made subsequent missions more successful. But many failures have occurred relatively recently, proving again and again that space exploration is very, very difficult. But since 1996, Mars exploration has undergone a Renaissance, with data from four orbiters and four landed missions developing a revolutionary new view of Mars as an Earth-like world with a complex geologic history. Planet Mars. Sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images of Mars, showing Syrtis Major, taken 1994-1995.
Note the seasonal changes and varying distance effects. Maas Digital Gallery. Gallery: Mars Exploration Rovers Maas Digital created this dramatic, scientifically accurate computer animation to illustrate NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.
Maas Digital's original Mars Rover video, plus six more minutes of original animation, are featured in Mars Dead or Alive, a PBS NOVA documentary. The entire NOVA program can be seen on-line at this link. The NOVA program was nominated for two Emmy awards in 2005. Watch the video: Dan Maas: Background and technical info on the videoCGNetworks interview From Cornell's Athena website:A play-by-play explanation of what's happening in the videoA high-resolution desktop image Astrobiology Magazine: Digitally Directed, The Mars Missions (more making-of information)Unreal Film-maker of Martian Reality Gulf Times (Qatar): Article & interview about Dan's presentation of the video in Doha, Qatar.
Mission to Mars. Cmex.ihmc. Mars Exploration Timeline. Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home. Mars Exploration Program.