This paper discusses long-range rovers to be flown as part of NASA’s newly reformulated Mars Exploration Program (MEP). These rovers are currently scheduled for launch first in 2007 as part of a joint science and technology mission, and then again in 2011 as part of a planned Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. These rovers are characterized by substantially longer range capability than their pre...

Introduction: The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is expected to launch in August 2005, arrive at Mars in March 2006, and begin the primary science phase in November 2006. MRO will carry a suite of remote-sensing instruments and is designed to routinely point off-nadir to precisely target locations on Mars for high-resolution observations. The mission will have a much higher data return than ...

In a previous paper, a new scenario for human missions to Mars has been presented. It can be named the 2-4-2 concept. The idea is to minimize IMLEO and the payload on Mars with a crew of only two astronauts. There are two astronauts in each rocket at departure from Earth. They meet on Mars to form a team of four and the pairs are reconstituted for the return (2-4-2). In the previous study it wa...

Motivation Recent observations of planetary bodies have revealed surface activities that have intrigued the science community. Image sequences of Saturn’s moon Enceladus have shown what appears to be icy particles ejecting from its south polar regions. High resolutions images from the Mars Global Surveyor and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have captured recent activities on the interior of cra...

We searched the COBE DIRBE Sky and Zodi Atlas for a wake of dust trailing Mars and for Trojan dust near Jupiter’s L5 Lagrange point. We compare the DIRBE images to a model Mars wake based on the empirical model of the Earth’s wake as seen by the DIRBE and place a 3-σ upper limit on the fractional overdensity of particles in the Mars wake of 18% of the fractional overdensity trailing the Earth. ...

In the quest for planetary exploration, Mars holds a special position in view of the many similarities it has with Earth. This article highlights the significant aspects of the concept design and planning which paved the way for the successful Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM). Lessons learnt from historical failures of Mars missions are summarized. The main driving factors of the MOM design ar...

For transferring data between heterogeneous databases, XML is becoming a method of choice. While deployment is generally successfully, there are barriers to overcome. A recent example at NLM involved transfers between “DCMS” and “Mars”. These two document workflow systems, with separate databases, process biomedical journals for incorporation into NLM’s “MEDLINE”. DCMS acts as an overall manage...

MAVEN uses a planetographic coordinate system to report altitude, latitude, and longitude on Mars. By contrast, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter generally used a planetocentric coordinate system. These two coordinate systems are different: latitudes differ by up to 0.34 degrees and altitudes differ by up to 2 km. These differences are large enoug...

[1] The quadrupole mass spectrometer of the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument on Curiosity rover has made the first high-precision measurement of the nonradiogenic argon isotope ratio in the atmosphere of Mars. The resulting value of 36Ar/38Ar = 4.2 ± 0.1 is highly significant for it provides excellent evidence that "Mars" meteorites are indeed of Martian origin, and it points to a signi...

[1] Mars is an unmagnetized planet whose hydrogen exosphere extends into the solar wind, creating proton cyclotron waves. Mars Global Surveyor data reveal the occurrence of waves to be extensive and often intermittent at large distance, indicating that the exosphere is time varying or non-spherical. When the region of wave occurrence is examined in a magnetic-electric coordinate system, a stron...