If you're a robot like NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, getting shut down because of a budget cut would certainly suck, considering that you just aided in discovering something as valuable as a habitable niche on Mars. It's a good thing that the NASA robot was spared of that fate, however - or was it? Read the two conflicting statements from NASA for more details.

Some of you may think that women and cars don't mix, but NASA begs to differ. On a recent NASA mission driving the Mars Exploration Rovers, an all-women team took the driver's seat in honor of Women's History Month. More details in the full article.

Google and the X-Prize Foundation have set up a high brow challenge to any private, non-government entity who can land a rover on the moon and send back at least a gigabyte of images, video and data back to Earth.

The Internet search giant is willing to invest over US$ 30 million to anyone willing to take up the herculean task.

The first prize of US$ 20 million will be given to the first private firm to reach the moon and then soft land a rover to travel at least 500m and gather a specific set of images, video, and data. The second prize winner will get up to US$ 5 million for being able to repeat the first placer's achievements.

Bonuses of US$ 5 million will be given to rovers which complete other objectives such as traveling further on the Moon, taking pictures of Apollo hardware, finding water-ice, and surviving an entire lunar night.

X-Prize Foundation CEO Peter Diamandis explains the objective for such a competition: "We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration."

Challengers have until 2012 to complete the task. After that, the prize money will be lowered to US$ 15 million until 2014, when the competition will officially end. This is actually the third competition administered by the X-Prize Foundation.

The first one involved a similar "space race" while the second one was the sequencing of 100 human genomes in 10 days.

The Mars rover Opportunity, NASA's "other main man" on Mars, is about to reach the rim of the crater known as Victoria. The crater, which is approximately half a mile wide and 230 feet deep, is one of Opportunity's major stop-overs on the Red Planet. The crater is named after one of the five ships of Ferdinand Magellan and the first ship to circumnavigate the Blue Planet.

"Victoria has been our destination for more than half the mission," said Ray Arvidson of St. Louis's Washington University, the deputy principal investigator for Opportunity and Spirit, another rover. "Examination of the rocks exposed in the walls of the crater will greatly increase our understanding of past conditions on Mars and the role of water."

NASA described the two rovers' accomplishments as equivalent to 10 prime missions. While the space agency could not predict the lifespan of Opportunity and Spirit, they have said that they intend to get the best possible data out of the rovers for as long as possible.

The rovers, which NASA considers as national treasures, have been on Mars since January 2004.

Seems that humans aren't the only ones to suffer ailments like stiff shoulders, easily broken limbs and dimming eyesight as they get older.

As winter descends upon Mars' Southern Hemisphere, NASA's rovers appear to be entering the winter of their lives as well, suffering from problems stemming from aging hardware. Nonetheless, they're continuing to make new discoveries about the Red Planet.

Spirit, stationed about 15° south of Mars' equator (roughly equivalent to northern Brazil and central Africa on Earth), is starting to slow down because it's receiving less sunlight. Opportunity is closer to the equator, so experiences less seasonal variation in light. Despite the age-related problems they are expecting, they have performed beyond all expectations; they were originally designed to operate for just 90 days when they landed on opposite sides of Mars two and a half years ago.

Spirit's right front wheel gave up the ghost back in March. The rover team decided  to park Spirit on a rocky slope called Low Ridge Haven for the winter. From this spot, Spirit has continued to examine the rocks and soil around it while measuring the atmosphere's temperature.

Opportunity, like some of us, is suffering from a a stiff shoulder joint - in this case, on its instrument deployment arm. The rover team is trying to avoid exacerbating the problem, using the arm as little as possible. Its anemic performance was a few weeks ago, however, when the wind blew the dust off of its solar panels, allowing them to absorb more solar energy.

Over the past weekend, Opportunity examined a 30-metre-wide crater named Beagle, and is now on its way to an area where the wind has deposited sand and dust in rippled structures. The presence of sand clods indicate the possibility of small amounts of water, according to rover team member Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

Arvidson hopes the site will reveal something of the area's history geologic history over the past four billion years, when several small lakes apparently dried up. He'd like to know how acidic the water was farther back in time on the Red Planet. "That really tells you about habitability," he says. "Most astrobiologists think that life is easier to get started in more neutral conditions." Earlier geologic data indicates that Martian water was very acidic.

In the meantime, click on the picture below to get a better look at a recent image of the Martian surface.

Two iron meteorites were recently discovered on the Martian surface by the Spirit rover.  The rover Opportunity, discovered similar space rock on the other side of the Mars about eighteen months ago, but these are the first to be seen by Spirit.

The rocks were photographed in April 2006, just after it parked at Low Ridge Haven, a northern-tilting slope where the rover is spending the Martian boreal winter.

The ferrous rocks appear smoother and lighter in tone than surrounding rocks. They are similar to the "Heat Shield Rock"  found by Opportunity near its discarded heat shield last year. Observations of that rock by Opportunity's instruments showed it was very reflective – a good indication of its metallic nature.  Now, similar observations by the Mini-TES on Spirit indicate these newly discovered rocks are also metallic.

"They're very good reflectors," says mission member Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, US. "We're seeing the heat of the sky being reflected to Mini-TES. I don't know how that can happen unless it's a metal."

Few space rocks on the Martian surface would are expected to be ferrous, but their appearance and spectral properties make them much easier to identify.

The meteorites are fragments of larger space rocks pushed out of the asteroid belt to land on Mars. They remain on the surface because there are few geological processes on Mars that would bury them or cause them to erode.

"It's not surprising that we occasionally drive past a meteorite," says Arvidson. "Mars is a very old surface and the erosion rates are relatively small, so we should expect these things to collect and be exposed for our viewing."

Computers are wonderful machines when it comes to performing calculations and carrying out precise orders. When it comes to making value judgements and taking initiative, however, they have historically left much to be desired.

NASA is hoping to make a change in this direction, making their Mars robot probes a little "smarter."

Within the next four weeks, NASA's rovers will get a software upgrade, allowing them to make "intelligent" decisions in their observations of Martian clouds and dust devils. New algorithms will enable the robots' computers to search through images and select those featuring specific phenomena, which will then be sent to Earth. This will increase the machines' efficiency, maximising the value downloaded data.

NASA plans to make its robotic craft increasingly autonomous as time goes on. "An instrument can acquire considerably more data than can be down-linked - this is a recurring theme on all spacecraft," explains JPL's Rebecca Castano. The idea, she says, is to "analyse [the data] onboard for features of specific interest, and then down-link only the data that have the highest priority." 

Currently, the rovers are allocated time to look for clouds and dust devils, which may or may not appear - they are naturally transient events. For humans to sift through images for clouds and dust devils - which appear sporadically - is time consuming. This software upgrade, will streamline the process considerably.