Mysterious Mars “monolith” is just a broken boulder

September 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - New, three-dimensional imaging of Martian north-polar ice layers by a radar instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter matches with theoretical models of Martian climate swings during the past few million years. Alignment of the layering patterns with the modeled climate cycles provides insight about how the layers accumulated.

August 31st, 2009 PANAJI - India will undertake Mission Mars between 2013 to 2015, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief G. Madhavan Nair said here Monday.

August 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned a dramatic oblique view of the Martian crater that a rover explored for two years. The new view of Victoria Crater shows layers on steep crater walls, difficult to see from straight overhead, plus wheel tracks left by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity between September 2005 and August 2007.

August 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists, using images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, have reported direct evidence of lake shorelines in the Shalbatana Vallis in Mars. Scientists generally believe that warm, wet conditions existed on Mars until only about 3.7 billion years ago.

July 24th, 2009 SYDNEY - Mars may have been a seething cauldron for nearly a 100 million years after its formation, thwarting evolution of life on the planet, according to an analysis of meteorites. The research has shown that the red planet remained excessively hot - with temperatures over 1,000 degrees Celsius - for 100 million years following its formation.

July 20th, 2009 WASHINGTON - It's been decades since they set foot on the moon, but the pioneers of the Apollo programme remain committed to exploring space with the goal of sending a human to Mars. Seven astronauts from the Apollo programme talked with journalists Monday to mark the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

July 19th, 2009 Aldrin: NASA should work to put people on MarsWASHINGTON — Former Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin says NASA should set its sights on a bigger target in the future: Mars. Aldrin made the comments on the eve of the 40th anniversary of his landing on the moon on the Apollo 11 mission.

July 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Parts of Mars resemble places on Earth, including its landscape, history of water, soil and even its weather, says a study. Mark Lemmon, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, long involved with Mars missions, says last year's Phoenix Mars Lander mission keeps revealing secrets about the planet, answering some questions but raising other big ones.

June 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of Boulder (US) scientists and engineers has tested a new instrument prototype that might be used to detect groundwater deep inside Mars. Known as the Mars Time Domain Electromagnetic Sounder (MTDEM), the instrument uses induction to generate electrical currents in the ground, whose secondary magnetic fields are in turn detected at the planetary surface.

June 20th, 2009 Washington, June 20 (ANI): Scientists have found evidence of the remnants of an ancient lake nestled in a valley near the Martian equator, which may have held as much water as Lake Champlain. According to a report in Disocvery News, the evidence was found by Gaetano di Achille and a team of researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US, in the form of an ancient shoreline ringing Shalbatana Vallis, a gash in Mars' surface just east of the massive volcanic province, Tharsis Rise.

June 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder research team has discovered the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars, an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet. Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep, according to CU-Boulder Research Associate Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study.

June 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is in safe mode and in communications with Earth after an unexpected rebooting of its computer on the evening of June 3. The spontaneous reboot resembles a February 23 event on the spacecraft.

June 5th, 2009 Mars orbiter enters safe mode after disturbancePASADENA, Calif. — NASA says its powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is in safe mode after being hit by a cosmic ray or solar particle.

March 28th, 2009 LONDON - An amateur archaeologist has suggested that a giant boulder on a hill overlooking Loch Ness, a Scottish lake, was used as a guide for crop sowing and harvesting by residents of the Great Glen more than 5000 years ago. According to a report in The Inverness Courier, John Forsyth, the archaeologist in question, is convinced that the five-meter wide rock was intentionally placed there by early man.

March 28th, 2009 LONDON - Scientists have reported the discovery of a methane-producing mineral on Mars. According to a report in Nature News, the evidence for the existence of the mineral, known as serpentine, was found by Bethany Ehlmann, a PhD student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.