[Thursday, January 01, 2004] The eigth attempt by NASA's Mars Odyssey to communicate with Beagle 2 was made on 31 Dec. but no data were received. This was the eleventh programmed contact period since Beagle 2 landed on 25 December.

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[Friday, January 02, 2004] The white ellipse marks the approximate location of Spirit's landing zone. Gusev Crater is about 165 km (103 mi) across. This image, acquired in November 2003, is located near 14.5°S, 184.6°W.

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[Friday, January 02, 2004] The Maestro team at NASA JPL has created a public version of the primary software tool used to operate the twin mars rovers. You can download a scaled-down version of the program yourself. All major operating systems are supported.

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[Saturday, January 03, 2004] The Spirit rover will land just after 8:35 p.m. Pacific Standard Time today, 3 Jan 2004 (04:35, 4 Jan 2004 UTC). It is expected to land somewhere within the approximately 83 km (~52 mi) long by ~10 km (~6 mi) wide ellipse on the floor of Gusev Crater.

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[Saturday, January 03, 2004] Scientists working on the Beagle 2 project remain optimistic about the possibility of contacting the Mars lander, which was due to land on the Red Planet on Christmas Day.

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[Saturday, January 03, 2004] In a perfect world, or in this case two perfect worlds -- Earth and Mars, the first of NASA's two robot geologists will bounce over rocks and roll to a safe stop on the martian surface shortly after 8:35 p.m. PST, January 3, 2004.

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[Saturday, January 03, 2004] NASA's Spirit Rover reached the surface of Mars at 8:35 PM PST (11:35 PM EST) tonight. NASA JPL has received data from the rover indicating that it survived the landing and has received a deluge of high resolution photos as well.

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[Sunday, January 04, 2004] This panorama was taken by the Spirit rover shortly after it landed.

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[Sunday, January 04, 2004] These images, taken by the Navigation Camera onboard Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, shows the surface of Mars near the Rover as well as portions of the Rover itself.

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[Sunday, January 04, 2004] The image first shows the location of the Mars Pathfinder lander (MPF) and the nearby boulder, Yogi. The second image shows the location of the Viking 1 (VL-1) lander.

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[Sunday, January 04, 2004] Today ESA's Mars Express spacecraft successfully executed an essential planned manoeuvre to reduce its orbit around the Red Planet from an orbit apocentre (highest point) of 190 000 km to 40 000 km with a pericentre (lowest point) of about 250 km.

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[Sunday, January 04, 2004] Mars24 is a cross-platform Java application and applet which displays a Mars "sunclock", a graphical representation of Mars showing the current sun- and nightsides of Mars, along with a numerical readout of the time in 24-hour format.

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[Sunday, January 04, 2004] David Palermo from WorldVR.com has created this spectacular Quicktime VR panorama of Spirit's landing site using imagery sent back from Mars less than 24 hours ago.

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[Sunday, January 04, 2004] If you have the red/blue glasses, visit this page. Also, please be certain to visit the amazing 3D image collection at marsunearthed.com. There is an artist behind these images.

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[Monday, January 05, 2004] According to information received from NASA, this weekend's landing of the Spirit rover on Mars drew an unprecedented audience for NASA on the Internet.

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[Monday, January 05, 2004] Spirit's landing site an area riddled with dust devil tracks in the summertime. With some luck those dust devils have scoured the surface clean of dust, exposing the underlying rocks which hold the secrets of Mars' past.

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[Tuesday, January 06, 2004] "Sleepy Hollow," a shallow depression in the Mars ground near NASA's Spirit rover, may become an early destination when the rover drives off its lander platform in a week or so.

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[Tuesday, January 06, 2004] NASA has announced plans to name the landing site of the Mars Spirit Rover in honor of the Shuttle Columbia astronauts. The area in the vast flatland of the Gusev Crater where Spirit landed this weekend will be called the Columbia Memorial Station.

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[Tuesday, January 06, 2004] This is the first color image of Mars taken by the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It is the highest resolution image ever taken on the surface of another planet.

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[Wednesday, January 07, 2004] NASA JSC's Remote Field Demonstration Test Site - also known as the "Mars rock pile" - provides a test bed for "dry run" tests of advanced spacesuit mobility studies. The test site is representative of a Mars-like, rock-strewn surface.

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[Wednesday, January 07, 2004] "There are opportunities to contact Beagle still to come, though we've established today that it is certainly not in a particular communications mode that we had expected it to be in."

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[Thursday, January 08, 2004] On the left, the circular topographic feature dubbed Sleepy Hollow can be seen along with dark markings that may be surface disturbances caused by the airbag-encased lander as it bounced and rolled to rest.

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[Thursday, January 08, 2004] The engineers and scientists for NASA's Spirit are eager to get the rover off its lander and out exploring the terrain that Spirit's pictures are revealing, but caution comes first.

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[Thursday, January 08, 2004] American astronauts will return to the moon early in the next decade in preparation for sending crews to explore Mars and nearby asteroids, President Bush will propose next week as part of a sweeping reform of the U.S. space program.

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[Saturday, January 10, 2004] Spirit has stood up and extended its front wheels while continuing to delight its human partners with new information about its neighborhood within Mars' Gusev Crater.

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[Saturday, January 10, 2004] Less than a week after landing on Mars, NASA's Spirit rover has found possible evidence that water once flowed on the now-barren planet, the goal of the mission. The scientists are cautious about their interpretation.

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[Monday, January 12, 2004] The first 360-degree color view from NASA's Spirit Mars Exploration Rover presents a range of tempting targets from nearby rocks to hills on the horizon.

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[Monday, January 12, 2004] David Palermo from WorldVR.com has created another Quicktime VR view of the first 360-degree color view from NASA's Spirit Mars Exploration Rover.

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[Tuesday, January 13, 2004] NASA's Spirit has begun pivoting atop its lander platform on Mars, and the robot's human partners have announced plans to send it toward a crater, then toward some hills, during the mission.

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[Tuesday, January 13, 2004] This animation shows the view from the rear hazard avoidance cameras on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit as the rover turns 45 degrees clockwise. This maneuver is the first step in a 3-point turn that will rotate the rover 115 degrees to face west.

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[Wednesday, January 14, 2004] Today, the President committed the United States to a long-term human and robotic program to explore the solar system, starting with a return to the Moon that will ultimately enable future exploration of Mars and other destinations.

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[Thursday, January 15, 2004] NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully drove off its lander platform and onto the soil of Mars early today.

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[Friday, January 16, 2004] NASA's Spirit rover reached out with its versatile robotic arm early today and examined a patch of fine-grained martian soil with a microscope at the end of the arm.

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[Friday, January 16, 2004] This close-up look at a patch of martian soil is the sharpest image ever taken of another planet. The picture was captured by the microscopic imager located on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's instrument deployment device, or "arm."

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[Friday, January 16, 2004] Today, ESA's Mars Express orbiter flies almost directly over the NASA Spirit rover at Gusev Crater at an altitude of about 300 kilometres. Mars Express uses four instruments to look down, while Spirit looks up.

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[Friday, January 16, 2004] Every day, people around the world tune in weather forecasts to plan their days ahead. Soon ESA will be delivering the same service for Mars, thanks to an ingenious experiment on board Mars Express.

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[Sunday, January 18, 2004] With barely a week before reaching Mars, NASA's Opportunity spacecraft adjusted its trajectory, or flight path, for the first time in four months.

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[Monday, January 19, 2004] Although the seven scientific instruments on board Mars Express are still undergoing a thorough calibration phase, they have already started collecting amazing results. The first high-resolution images and spectra of Mars have already been acquired.

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[Tuesday, January 20, 2004] NASA's Spirit rover has successfully driven to its first target on Mars, a football-sized rock that scientists have dubbed Adirondack.

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[Wednesday, January 21, 2004] This image mosaic taken by the panoramic camera onboard the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the rover's landing site, the Columbia Memorial Station, at Gusev Crater, Mars.

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[Wednesday, January 21, 2004] Controllers were able to send commands to the Spirit early Wednesday and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them, but they did not receive expected scientific and engineering data during scheduled communication passes.

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[Thursday, January 22, 2004] "Exploration of the solar system will be guided by compelling questions of scientific and societal importance."

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[Friday, January 23, 2004] The flight team for NASA's Spirit received data from the rover in a communication session that began at 13:26 Universal Time (5:26 a.m. PST) and lasted 20 minutes at a data rate of 120 bits per second.

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[Friday, January 23, 2004] One of the main targets of the Mars Express mission is to discover the presence of water in one of its chemical states. Through the initial mapping of the South polar cap it has already revealed the presence of water ice and carbon dioxide ice.

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[Friday, January 23, 2004] The Mars Express orbiter was successfully inserted into orbit around Mars on 25 December 2003. Scientific payload commissioning has started and the payload instruments started returning their first scientific measurements from Mars orbit.

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[Friday, January 23, 2004] Some members of the flight team for NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are preparing for this weekend's landing of the second rover, Opportunity, while others are focused on trying to restore the first rover, Spirit, to working order.

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[Friday, January 23, 2004] Some of the scientists on the Mars Exploration Rover Science team don't really care too much about rocks. Their passion lies in the skies - the martian skies - and, from the hazy glow of the atmosphere, they pull precious pieces of information.

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[Friday, January 23, 2004] NASA's Spirit rover did not go to sleep today even after ground controllers sent commands twice for it to do so.

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[Saturday, January 24, 2004] Hours before NASA's Opportunity rover reaches Mars, engineers have found a way to communicate reliably with its twin, Spirit.

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[Saturday, January 24, 2004] NASA's Mars Opportunity Rover landed on the Surface of Mars this evening at 9:05 PM PST.

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[Sunday, January 25, 2004] NASA's Opportunity Rover has already sent back dozens of photos from Mars. According to mission PI Steve Sqyures "its like nothing I have ever seen before!"

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[Sunday, January 25, 2004] This is one of the first images beamed back to Earth from the rover shortly after it touched down. The image was captured by the rover's panoramic camera.

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[Sunday, January 25, 2004] Once again Jeffrey WIlliams at Marsunearthed.com has been kind enough to allow us to post anaglphs he has made of images received from Oportunity on Mars early this morning.

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[Monday, January 26, 2004] No contact has been made with the Beagle 2 lander, despite repeated efforts over the last few days to communicate via the Mars Express and Mars Odyssey spacecraft and the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire, UK.

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[Monday, January 26, 2004] During the second day on Mars for NASA's Opportunity rover, key science instruments passed health tests and the rover made important steps in communicating directly with Earth.

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[Tuesday, January 27, 2004] NASA memorialized the Apollo 1 crew by dedicating the hills surrounding the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's landing site to the astronauts. The crew of Apollo 1 perished during a launch pad test of their Apollo spacecraft 37 years ago today.

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[Wednesday, January 28, 2004] NASA recently dedicated the landing site of the Spirit rover on Mars to the crew of Columbia. Curiously, the JPL logo that was on the plaque when it left Earth disappeared on Mars. Where did it go?

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[Wednesday, January 28, 2004] NASA announced plans to name the landing site of the Mars Opportunity rover in honor of the Space Shuttle Challenger's final crew. The area where Opportunity landed this weekend, will be called the Challenger Memorial Station.

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[Wednesday, January 28, 2004] NASA's Opportunity rover has untucked its front wheels and latched its suspension system in place, key steps in preparing to drive off its lander and onto martian soil.

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[Wednesday, January 28, 2004] Spirit took and returned this image on January 28, the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image from the front hazard identification camera shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack.

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[Thursday, January 29, 2004] The American Astronautical Association announced today the publication of "Martian Expedition Planning" a new book which brings together papers essential for the planning of future expeditions to the polar caps, volcanoes and canyons of the Red Planet.

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[Thursday, January 29, 2004] Spirit has resumed taking pictures as engineers continue work on restoring its health. Meanwhile, Spirit's twin, Opportunity, extended its rear wheels backward to driving position last night as part of preparations to roll off its lander, possibly as ea

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[Friday, January 30, 2004] Following the President's speech on 14 January, Sean O'Keefe responded to questions about the new space policy. O'Keefe's remarks provide greater detail about the Administration's intentions, and serve as a preview of coming congressional hearings.

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[Saturday, January 31, 2004] NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drove down a reinforced fabric ramp at the front of its lander platform and onto the soil of Mars' Meridiani Planum this morning.

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