But still be able to use your hands. Not only will you want to move your fingers, you want to move around. NASAs lunar electric rover is a prototype for future missions to the moon and Mars. Its part vehicle and part space suit. I can just picture be...
Want to step outside to take in the scenery or pick up some rocks? As familiar as it might look beyond the port hole, Mars is dangerously alien. The upside is the low gravity will give you super jumping abilities, the down, the almost complete lack o...
Before we take this giant leap, we need to be able to carry everything needed for a three-year -round trip with us. This is a much larger effort than getting to the moon. Its the Apollo mission on steroids. At this point we know at least as much as t...
A test run before attempting the fuel hungry and risky trip to the planet below. Dreaming about Mars and actually going there are two very different things. Mars may be our neighbour, but 35 million miles to the closest point is still a very long way...
Steve Squyres Martian odyssey has taken him from pole to pole, visiting those places on earth that share at least some of the same characteristics. They are extremely dry, extremely cold or extremely dead. Death Valley is one of his favorites. This i...
In the four decades since our robots first arrived, the once fuzzy ball at the end of our telescopes has steadily focused into a red planet we can understand, and it is not a welcoming place. The problem is the atmosphere is so thin and cold that wat...
Therere some basic things you should know about Mars before leaving home. Most days will be clear, and sunny and cold. The average temperature on Mars is as bitter as midwinter in Antarctica. And about half the diameter of the earth, Mars is a handy...
Could life have been forged in the same way on both planets? When we sent the first probe to investigate in the 1960s, almost anything was possible. Originally in the popular imagination we thought that Mars might be inhabited by whole civilizations,...
Its been said that the first person on Mars is alive somewhere on earth today. Imagine its you. What do you need to know? How much you get there? What should you pack? What are some of the must-see sights and what should you avoid? Think of this as y...
Have you ever fantasized about going somewhere special? Somewhere far from crowds, off the beaten track. Somewhere out of this world? Is it time to catch a rocket to the Red Planet? Mars is filled with mysteries, Volcanoes 75,000 feet tall, huge cany...
Valor will be tackling the acid clouds of Venus with little help from flying pan technology. This being two weather balloons are we watched Venus in the mid-1980s. This with wagon machines there were two sep balloons that the Russians put them in the...
Despite all this scientific effort, we still don't know what triggered Venus' diabolical transformation. People debated over whether Venus ever had a moon. If Venus had a satellite at one point, could that satellite eventually impacted onto the surfa...
You never guess the dangers on the ground from orbit, except maybe for this, massive, double-barreled storms hovering above the poles. Of this, what we called dipole features trailing around, we don't know what, really what they are, but the whole fe...
Congratulations, you've arrived on the hottest surface in the solar system. Here, the official temperature is eight hundred seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Day or night, equator or pole, the searing heat never varies more than a few degrees, and thats wh...
One of the really exciting and high-level scientific interests is whether Venus is geological active today, because there are reasons to think of the clouds on Venus only exist, because there is ongoing geological activity, so this is one of the bigg...
