NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in safe mode after unexpected rebooting

September 29th, 2009 SYDNEY - New reports indicate that the NASA Viking 2 probe, which landed on Mars in 1976, may have come within centimeters of finding water three decades before it was eventually found. According to a report in ABC News, the finding could result in scientists re-evaluating data collected by the spacecraft, which was sent to look for signs of life on the red planet.

September 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has revealed sub-surface water ice that may be 99 percent pure, halfway between the North Pole and the equator on the Red Planet. "We knew there was ice below the surface at high latitudes of Mars, but we find that it extends far closer to the equator than you would think, based on Mars' climate today," said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, a member of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, which runs the high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

September 24th, 2009 Spacecraft spies frozen water in Martian cratersPASADENA, Calif. — A spacecraft orbiting Mars has spotted water ice in several impact craters midway between the north pole and equator — the first time ice so close to the surface has been discovered so far south on the red planet.

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.

September 17th, 2009 LONDON - The Phoenix lander's Telltale instrument has measured for the first time wind speeds and directions in the Mars polar region. While these winds appeared to be dominated by turbulence, the highest wind speeds recorded of up to nearly 60 kilometers per hour coincided with the passing of weather systems, when also the number of dust devils increased by an order of magnitude.

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.

August 5th, 2009 LONDON - Scientists have solved the mystery of the rocky Mars "monolith" that resembled the black monolith from Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", and have determined that it is just a broken boulder. When a high-resolution camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the monolith last July, speculation was rife that it appeared to show evidence there was once life on the Red Planet.

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 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.

May 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has indicated that rivers might have flowed recently on the planet Mars. The study has found some serious valleys carved by rivers within the last billion years, which is much sooner than most similar findings.

April 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility are using the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter to monitor a new dust storm that has erupted on the Red Planet. The dust storm began in mid-March 2009, in the large Southern Hemisphere impact basin named Hellas.

April 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The teams operating NASA's twin Mars rovers is on alert for an upcoming dust storm season, which could be severe enough to minimize activities of the rovers. On April 21, Mars will be at the closest point to the Sun in the planet's 23-month, elliptical orbit.

April 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has determined that barring computer reboots, the vehicle is doing fine. The researchers are studying are diagnosing why the rover apparently rebooted its computer at least twice over the April 11-12 weekend.

March 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has rebooted successfully, following commands to shut down and restart, a strategy by its engineers to clear any memory flaws accumulated in more than five years since Odyssey's last reboot. The procedure also restored Odyssey's onboard set of backup systems, called the spacecraft's "B side," allowing its use in the future when necessary.