No one knows what went wrong with Mars Polar Lander and scientists still hope for a miracle.
Despite repeated attempts at contact, including with Mars Express, no trace of the British-built lander can be found.
Their initial efforts involved listening with Mars Odyssey, an American craft already in orbit, and with various Earth-bound radio telescopes.
ECONOMIST: The current crop of Mars missions has got off to a bad start
By organizing the human spaceflight program with Mars in mind, NASA can develop a near-term investment and exploration agenda that gets us somewhere interesting without any additional commitment of funding.
For example, scientists investigate the hyper-dry environments found in Antarctica (but there is still a lot of water, compared with Mars) or Death Valley (dry enough, but much hotter than Mars).
Europe entered the Mars race in 2003 with the Mars Express Orbiter and the Beagle 2 lander.
Cox and JPL colleagues are working with the Mars Exploration Rover missions.
You personally have been involved with other Mars projects.
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Too big to rely on air bags to cushion its fall as with previous Mars landers, Curiosity landed through an automated system of high-speed maneuvers, a supersonic parachute, eight retro-rockets and a set of "sky-crane" tethers that lowered the vehicle gently the last few feet to the ground.
The U.S. perfect it with putting a man on the man, then with a series of modern high tech space shuttle missions and Mars ROVERS. But now, the final frontier captains are more likely to be Russians, with their hopes for a human Mars landing someday, or Chinese, with a new China space station due within the next 8 years.
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On the screen is Mars with colors so perfect and detailed so sharp it's like being there yourself.
Katrina crushed Mars with 90-foot waves that toppled the drilling equipment stationed on deck and damaged vital pumping and processing gear.
The measurements have been used to construct a precise topographical map of Mars with many applications in geophysics, geology and atmospheric circulation.
"To us it just looked like somebody came along the surface of Mars with a jackhammer and lifted up the sidewalk that you might see in downtown LA at a construction site, " he joked.
Next up, things get a bit animated with Packing for Mars author Mary Roach, who will discuss the grosser side of manned space travel, while professional prognosticator (and sometimes rock musician) John Roderick kicks off his new reoccurring segment by explaining how space exploration helps him get out of bed in the morning.
On a screen behind the lectern at the briefing, Doug McCuistion, the director of the Mars program, projected a poster with a halftime score on it: Mars 24, Earth 15.
The Mars Inspiration team is aiming for a January 2018 launch because it coincides with a close alignment of Mars and Earth, such that a round trip would take about a year-and-a half, or 501 days - whereas outside of this window such a trip might take two or three years .
If the thing has been built with components from the Mars Rover, a bit of heat and dust shouldn't faze it.
And with more sunlight as Mars' springtime begins, activity is picking up.
These observations contrast sharply with the findings of Mars rover Opportunity, which landed on a different part of Mars in 2004 and is still chugging along.
"With the high resolution Mars Orbiter Camera images, things that look smooth at low resolution appear very rough from high resolution and vice versa, " said David Spencer, mission manager for the Mars 2001 mission.
And in perhaps the week's oddest story, the Dutch nonprofit Mars One announced that it is now accepting applications for a four-person Mars colony with hopes of establishing a permanent settlement on the Red Planet.
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Miller also is reanalyzing the data to see if there are variations when sunlight was blocked by a weeks-long dust storm on Mars, with the idea being that biological systems would have acted differently to the environmental change than geologic ones.
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"The role of liquid water on Mars is of great importance for its habitability and this study using Mars Express describes a very large zone where groundwater was present for a long time, " said Olivier Witasse, a project scientist with ESA's Mars Express.
MSN: New proof that water existed underground on ancient Mars
President Bush's plans for a return to the moon in 2020, with a trip to Mars to follow, were all well and good, but now NASA has finally fleshed out the details of the moon visits, and it seems a permanent international moon base is in the cards.
Contact has finally been made with Russia's troubled Mars mission, says the European Space Agency (Esa).
Mars was bombarded with approximately 2.6 million of these pulses.
With the first week on Mars behind them, the scientists and engineers who put Pathfinder on the Red Planet say they have already met the major objectives set for the mission.
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