NASA MARS HiRise Image: A Hole In Mars' Surface

What created this unusual hole in Mars?

The hole was discovered by chance on images of the dusty slopes of Mars' Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently circling Mars.

 The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated on the image right.

Analysis of this and follow-up images revealed the opening to be about 35 meters across, while the interior shadow angle indicates that the underlying cavern is roughly 20 meters deep.

Why there is a circular crater surrounding this hole remains a topic of speculation, as is the full extent of the underlying cavern.

Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life.

These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers.

NASA Mars Exploration: Seeking Public Opinion!

NASA is giving you a platform in the form of the NASA Mars Forum that is currently calling for participants. Throughout June you can pose questions related to the re-planning of the Mars Exploration Program.

With the reduced 2013 US budget for space exploration, NASA was forced to withdraw from two missions planned together with the European Space Agency (ESA).

Further revision of the Mars Exploration Program (MEP) is also needed to accommodate new developments in science, human space flight, and technology.

Last week, a Mars exploration workshop was held in Houston, Texas with all the outputs now available at the Mars Exploration Concepts and Approaches website.

Various challenges, approaches, and strategies are presented here for the website visitors to get inspired and contribute to the forum with their opinions and ideas.


The activity should result in selecting the highest pay-off mission architecture with the first launch opportunity in 2018. The strategy will take into account the challenge of sending humans to orbit Mars in the 2030s.

The experimental forum will be active until July 1, 2012. NASA hopes the forum will provide them with a better understanding of public interest and specific areas on which to focus attention.

NEEMO 16 mission scheduled for June: Asteroid underwater training

The next NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) mission is being scheduled for June, with teams already preparing for a recon trip ahead of the exercise.

The underwater training exercises are staged at the Aquarius underwater habitat in Key Largo, Florida – simulating the conditions and protocols for a real Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) mission.

NEEMO 15 was the first real full scale operation – even including Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) teams – continuing the trend of testing equipment and operations required for exploration of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs).

The mission treated the underwater environment like a giant Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), allowing for specialist divers to simulate working on a NEA, communicating – with time delays – with mission control and practising the use of tools to work on an asteroid.

The October NEEMO 15 mission was led by NASA astronaut and former International Space Station (ISS) crew member Shannon Walker.

The crew included Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques from the 2009 NASA astronaut class.

Steven Squyres of Cornell University and scientific principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, joined James Talacek and Nate Bender of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington – who are both professional aquanauts.

NASA astronauts Stan Love, Richard Arnold and Mike Gernhardt, all veteran spacewalkers, participated in the NEEMO mission from the DeepWorker submersible, which they piloted.

The submersible is a key element of simulating a NEA mission, acting as an underwater stand-in for the Multi Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV), which is currently the leading concept to be the main NEA exploration vehicle at the site at the asteroid, utilizing its robotic arms and crew airlock.

Aquarius acts as the Deep Space Hab (DSH) for these missions, a large element of hardware that would arrive at the NEA after being launched from Earth on the Space Launch System (SLS) – likely the 105mt Block 1A Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle (HLV).

NEEMO 15 worked on three major elements of a NEA mission, such as how to anchor to the surface via the “excursion lines”; how to move around; and how best to collect data and materials.

Read More about NEEMO here

NASA Mars Spirit Lander and Bonneville Crater in Colour

Near the lower left corner of this view is the three-petal lander platform that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit drove off in January 2004.

The lander is still bright, but with a reddish colour, probably due to accumulation of Martian dust.

› See labeled version

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded this view on Jan. 29, 2012, providing the first image from orbit to show Spirit's lander platform in colour.

The view covers an area about 2,000 feet (about 600 meters) wide, dominated by Bonneveille Crater. North is up. A bright spot on the northern edge of Bonneville Crater is a remnant of Spirit's heat shield.

Spirit spent most of its six-year working life in a range of hills about two miles east of its landing site.

An image of the lander platform taken by Spirit's Panoramic Camera (Pancam) after the rover had driven off is at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05117.

The bright heat shield remnant can be seen in a panorama the same camera took of Bonneville Crater, at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA05591.jpg .

This image is one product from HiRISE observation ESP_025815_1655. Other products from the same observation can be found at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_025815_1655 .

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

NASA Mars Explorer Rover Opportunity - Image of Concepcion crater

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity took this image in preparation for the first autonomous selection of an observation target by a spacecraft on Mars.

Opportunity used its navigation camera to take this image after a drive during the 2,172nd Martian day, or sol, of its mission on Mars (March 4, 2010).

Using newly developed and uploaded software named Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or AEGIS, the rover analysed the image to identify the feature that best matched criteria given for selecting a target.

The top target that Opportunity selected with AEGIS is shown by the yellow marker. AEGIS was directed to look for rocks that were larger and darker in colour. The rover then used the software to take more detailed observations of the selected target using its panoramic camera.

The more-than-50 rocks in this image are near a young crater called 'Concepcion' and might have been thrown outward by the impact that excavated the crater.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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