Tag Archives: Mars 2020

Mars 2020 wired for sound

Posted on April 25, 2019 by rburnham

Engineers and technicians working on NASA’s Mars 2020 mission prepare spacecraft components for acoustic testing in the Environmental Test Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The spacecraft is being tested in the same configuration it will be … Continue reading →

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Mars 2020: Things are stacking up for the spacecraft

Posted on April 18, 2019 by rburnham

For the past few months, the clean room floor in High Bay 1 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has been covered in parts, components and test equipment for the Mars 2020 spacecraft, scheduled for launch toward the … Continue reading →

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MAVEN completes orbit change for Mars 2020

Posted on April 8, 2019 by rburnham

MAVEN has achieved a tighter orbit around Mars to act as a telecommunications relay. The two-month campaign began February 11 and ended April 5. MAVEN’s navigation team slowed the spacecraft down gradually by aerobraking, a process taking advantage of the … Continue reading →

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Mars 2020: Helicopter completes flight tests

Posted on March 29, 2019 by rburnham

Since the Wright brothers first took to the skies of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, Dec. 17, 1903, first flights have been important milestones in the life of any vehicle designed for air travel… In late January 2019, all the … Continue reading →

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2020 rover has landed in Jezero Crater again and again

Posted on March 19, 2019 by rburnham

In a little more than seven minutes in the early afternoon of Feb. 18, 2021, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will execute about 27,000 actions and calculations as it speeds through the hazardous transition from the edge of space to Mars’ … Continue reading →

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Winds of Jezero Crater

Posted on March 19, 2019 by rburnham

[Editor’s note: From a paper by Mackenzie Day and Taylor Dorn recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.] Wind in Jezero crater, Mars • Modern winds in Jezero crater come from the east, but ancient winds came from the southwest • … Continue reading →

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Defining the goals for collecting Mars samples

Posted on March 7, 2019 by rburnham

Returning samples from the surface of Mars has been a high-priority goal of the international Mars exploration community for many years. Although randomly collected samples would be potentially interesting, they would not be sufficient to answer the big questions that … Continue reading →

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Seeing Mars with 2020 vision: Jezero Crater and Oxia Planum

Posted on March 7, 2019 by rburnham

Both NASA and ESA hope their next Mars rovers will find evidence that life once thrived on Mars, but they have different strategies to reach this goal. Their landing site choices reflect this difference. Engineers are assembling two ambitious rover … Continue reading →

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JPL: Mars 2020 build update

Posted on February 18, 2019 by rburnham
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MAVEN: Shrinking its orbit to prepare for Mars 2020 rover

Posted on February 11, 2019 by rburnham

The 4-year-old atmosphere-sniffing MAVEN mission is embarking on a new campaign today to tighten its orbit around Mars. The operation will reduce the highest point of the MAVEN spacecraft’s elliptical orbit from 3,850 to 2,800 miles (6,200 to 4,500 kilometers) … Continue reading →

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