Hubble Space Telescope Spots Mars-Bound Comet Sprout Multiple Jets
Washington DC (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
NASA released Thursday an image of a comet that, on Oct. 19, will pass within 84,000 miles of Mars - less than half the distance between Earth and our moon.
The image on the left, captured March 11 by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows comet C/2013 A1, also called Siding Spring, at a distance of 353 million miles from Earth. Hubble can't see Siding Spring's icy nucleus because of its di ...
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Cleaner NASA Rover Sees Its Shadow in Martian Spring
Pasadena CA (JPL) Mar 28, 2014 -
Late afternoon lighting produced a dramatic shadow of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity photographed by the rover's rear hazard-avoidance camera on March 20, 2014.
The shadow falls across a slope called the McClure-Beverlin Escarpment on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity is investigating rock layers for evidence about ancient environments. The scene includes a ...
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Mars yard ready for Red Planet rover
Paris (ESA) Mar 31, 2014 -
A state-of-the-art 'Mars yard' is now ready to put the ExoMars rover through its paces before the vehicle is launched to the Red Planet in 2018. ESA, the UK Space Agency and Airbus Defence and Space opened the renovated test area in Stevenage, UK.
ExoMars is a joint endeavour between ESA and Russia's Roscosmos space agency. Comprising two missions for launch to Mars in 2016 and 2018, ExoMa ...
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The Opposition of Mars
Huntsville AL (SPX) Mar 31, 2014 -
By the time you finish reading this story, you'll be about 1,000 km closer to the planet Mars. Earth and Mars are converging for a close encounter. As March gives way to April, the distance between the two planets is shrinking by about 300 km every minute. When the convergence ends in mid-April, the gulf between Earth and Mars will have narrowed to only 92 million km--a small number on the vast ...
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Mars and Earth move closer together this month
Washington DC (UPI) Apr 01, 2014 -
Spring is here, love is in the air, and Mars and Earth are getting a little closer this time of year.
For the next two weeks, the two neighborly planets will continue to converge - the distance between them shrinking roughly 186 miles every minute.
By the time the convergence ends, Mars and Earth will have moved 57 million miles closer together. Such a distance may seem a pittan ...
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Health risks of Mars mission would exceed NASA limits
Washington (AFP) April 02, 2014 -
Efforts to send humans to Mars would likely expose them to health risks beyond the limits of what NASA currently allows, an independent panel of medical experts said Wednesday.
Therefore, any long-term or deep space missions - which are still decades off - need a special level of ethical scrutiny, said the report by the Institute of Medicine.
"These types of missions will likely expose ...
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Curiosity Scoping Out Next Study Area
Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 07, 2014 -
On Wednesday, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove the last 98 feet feet (30 meters) needed to arrive at a site planned since early 2013 as a destination for studying rock clues about ancient environments that may have been favorable for life.
The rover reached a vantage point for its cameras to survey four different types of rock intersecting in an area called "the Kimberley," after a region ...
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