Mars Curiosity lander will break into the Martian atmosphere with a scheduled decent August 6th. NASA is using a parachute and then a crazy risky rocket propelled crane to lower the lander onto the surface. Stay tuned! It will be exciting.
This panoramic photo was taken by the Mars rover Spirit. It shows dust covering up the solar panels. After 6 years of collecting data on the red planet, scientists are abandoning efforts to contact it after the Martian winter. The mission was supposed to last only a few months and people thought that the Spirit wouldn’t even make it that far. After a fixed computer glitch, it was good to go! Later it began to show its age and busted a wheel. It has spent the last few years traveling mostly backwards and scraping its wheel through the dirt. It discovered stuff (amorphous silica) that would have gone unnoticed if it actually had a wheel, because they would have driven right over it. Two years ago, it fell through a thin crust and into a camouflaged sand trap. It has continued to gather info about the atmosphere and the wobble of the rotation, but after a long winter and silent spring, NASA has given up.
