Page 4 - Phoenix Mars Lander News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Meet the Spartan who helped NASA go to Mars (again) As a high school student, Terry Himes dreamed of exploring space. Today, the Spartan who graduated in 1975 from Michigan State University’s College of Engineering is living his dream.     “Just today, I was building the relay commands for Mars 2020, but also Curiosity and InSight,” says Himes, a spacecraft and software engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.   NASA’s Perseverance rover arrived on Mars, landing safely on Feb. 18, joining the missions Himes references. The InSight lander touched down on Mars in 2018, and Cu...

  The University of Arizona-operated High Resolution Imaging Experiment camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Feb. 18 descent of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, the latest rover to touch down on the Red Planet. In the image above, Perseverance's landing capsule can be seen falling through the Martian atmosphere, with its parachute trailing behind. Since entering the orbit of Mars in March of 2006, the HiRISE camera, provided and operated by the UArizona Lunar Planetary Laboratory, has photographed the surface of the Red Planet in unprecedented detail. The camera als...

Mars has fascinated us for millennia. Almost from the time astronomers first turned their telescopes on the planet shining in the night sky, we've imagined life there. Unlike our other planetary neighbor, Venus, which remains shrouded in cloudy mystery, the red planet has invited speculation and exploration. Since the 1960s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union and, later, Russia and Japan, have launched spacecraft destined to land on or orbit Mars. The successful missions, like the very first Mars flyby in 1964 by the U.S. Mariner 4, have provided a treasure trove of data and, of course, introduced...

23 December 2020, 10:23 am EST By In this handout illustration provided by NASA/JPL, an artist's conception of the Phoenix Mars Lander on the Red Planet. Phoenix is slated to land on Mars on May 25, 2008.  ( (Photo Illustration by NASA/JPL via Getty Images) ) NASA has released an animation to explain and demonstrate how its one-tonne Perseverance rover will land on Mars scheduled on Feb.18, 2021. NASA's Mars mission The robot, Perseverance, is being sent to a crat...

While in grade school, NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins dreamed of exploring outer space .  Later, Watkins found her passion in geology, and excelled in sports. Her life changed when she received a phone call in 2017. "I got the phone call (asking me if I) want to come down to Johnson Space Center," she said. "It was really quite a moment of realizing that (childhood) dream." Three years after joining the astronaut corps, the Lafayette native was assigned to NASA's Artemis Team, with its goal to reach the moon by 2024.  If assigned to the future moon landing mission, Watkins would be the firs...