Mike Moran celebrated his 21st birthday on Mars.
Sort of.
The Beverly Hills man is part of a six-member team taking part in a research expedition at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. Moran is the chief astronomer for the crew.
“This mission is going well so far,” he wrote from the station. “We're at Sol 10 right now (a sol is a Martian day) and the crew and I have almost completely adjusted to living and working in the Hab.”
Funded by The Mars Society, Moran and the other crew members spent two weeks living in a model habitat near Hanksville, a small desert town that once served as a supply post for Butch Cassidy. Their mission was to conduct experiments and test equipment, as if they were on Mars.
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In August 1999, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Advanced Projects Design Team (Team X) studied a robotic mission to determine the ages of the volcanic and sedimentary rock layers in the walls of Valles Marineris, the great martian canyon system. The Mars Stratigraphy Mission (MSM), as it was called, would see a lander similar to that planned for the 2001 Mars Surveyor Program lander mission leave Earth atop a Delta 7925 rocket in April 2007 and land on Mars in October 2009. It would steer itself to a precision landing at 14° south latitude, 68° west longitude, no more than 10 kilometers from the Valles Marineris southern rim.
The MSM lander would deploy a specialized rover with three spherical inflatable "wheels." Throughout the surface mission, the solar-powered rover would communicate with Earth via a communications satellite in equatorial Mars orbit. The rover would need no more than 50 days to travel to the canyon rim. Once there, it would anchor the end of a tether to the ground and, paying out the tether behind it, rappel into the six-kilometer-deep canyon.
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The Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera has imaged craters both young and old in a new view of the southern highlands of Mars.
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Recent drives by the Spirit rover from Jan. 14 to Feb. 4, 2010 (Sols 2145 to 2165) moved the center of the rover approximately 13.4 inches (34 centimeters) backwards. Since Jan 26 (sol 2157), drive commands have concentrated on placing Spirit into a favorable tilt toward the sun as the Martian winter approaches.
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