December 2014
India joins the major league with the Mars Orbiter Mission
...as MOX-2 – the command and control centre for the Mars operations. The Mars team, many of them in their early twenties, clad ... Spectrometer – mapping the surface composition and mineralogy of Mars. While the camera was switched on much earlier, the...
November 2017
Roving the red planet
...Crater were made using orbital spectroscopy from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). These areas were examined up-close by Opportunity. Geochemical modelling of results from...
December 2014
Ready for Mars? From Mars-500 to zero-gravity medical issues
...closest thing on Earth to interplanetary exploration. ESA is studying the effects of isolation there to prepare for a mission to Mars While a Mars crew will be a peer group in many respects, a crew commander and deputy would seem the likely structure...
June 2015
Beagle 2: discovering the lost Mars lander
... (EDL) sequence for Beagle 2 worked and the lander did successfully touchdown on Mars on Christmas Day 2003. Beagle 2 hitched a ride to Mars on ESA’s Mars Express mission and was a collaboration between industry and academia. It would have delivered...
November 2016
Moon or Mars - NASA’s next logical step?
..., to pursue excellence. So what really is the next logical step for NASA? Is it to return to the Moon, or press forward to Mars? With shrinking space budgets, a lack of political will, and shortages of technological and medical knowledge, the compass...
March 2017
Growing plastic-producing bacteria in space
... at the University of Copenhagen - has been used to simulate temperature fluctuations, UV exposure and the low pressure found on Mars. The essential question is, how can biotechnology support and benefit future space missions? To highlight that the...
