Three spacecrafts are now hurtling toward the Red Planet to look for evidence that it might once have been wet enough to sustain life. Orbital projections of where Europe's Mars Express and the two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) are right now, can be continuously monitored over their half-year journeys.Posted by Van der Leun at October 2, 2003 11:49 AMExperiments performed by the MERs will help to determine whether water might have once existed in volume on the red planet. The two Mars Exploration Rovers are targeting what imagery indicates might have been ancient dry lake beds and other geologically interesting sites in early 2004.
The Martian Chronicles series gives an inside view of what it takes for scientists to deliver such a complex mars mission. The journal entries are from Cornell's Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers' scientific package called Athena.
The chronicles begin sequentially from the beginning of July 1999, four years before launch, and will culminate in the dramatic landing of the twin rovers on Mars in January 2004. The expected mission time roaming the red planet is ninety days, from January to April.
