Blog #4

My Topic

                         The amount of time that Spirit and Opportunity was expected to live was about 90 days, however, those two exceeded the time frame by quite a lot. Spirit lasted multiple years before it lost one of its wheels, drove along Mars for a little while longer and got stuck again in an area now know as Troy.  During its escape of Troy was the highlight of its life, in which it found soil, rich with sulfates which is a component of Steam.  According to NASA, this means hot or boiling water could have once existed on Mars. Unfortunately, Spirit stopped sending signals back to Earth in 2010, but Opportunity was still roaming the martian soil. During the July of 2010, it sent back its 100,000th signal back to Earth. 

                         The next mission after Curiosity is MAVEN, Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission.  The reason for MAVEN is to use the different models of the Sun, and to estimate how much water Mars has lost due to solar winds filled with radiation that come from the sun. MAVEN is scheduled to launch later this year. "The instruments for it are already built." (Zurek par 44) However, at this moment, NASA is currently focused on a 2,000 pound project called, "Curiosity."

Blog #3

My Topic

                           Some of you are probably asking yourselves, what kind of missions has NASA launched that is leading up to the foundation of life on another planet and sending a man to Mars.  It all begins with many failed attempts to send orbiters, primarily Mariner 3 throughout the 1960's.  However, during the May of 1971, Mariner 9 marked Americas first spacecraft to orbit a planet other than our own.  Coming out of that mission, hopes were high for the next couple Mars rovers which came to be known as the Viking missions. Those were the rovers that would search for micro-organisms, in which it claim to have found, but after a checkup on the same martian soil, it claimed to have found lifeless soil.  

                         Another setback was the lack of spending for NASA, which caused the space agency to pick its top priority in order to have sufficient funding.  They chose the space shuttle, and would not return to Mars until a successive orbitor mission in 1996 aboard the Mars Global Surveyor. During the next year, NASA sent Sojourner, in which it demonstrated air bag technology as a landing system.  Arriving in January 2004, Spirit and Opportunity landed on the martian soil.