Dr. Bill Boynton

Artist’s concept of Comet Siding Spring approaching Mars, shown with NASA’s orbiters preparing to make science observations of this unique encounter.

This mosaic image of Valles Marineris - colored to resemble the martian surface - comes from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), a visible-light and infrared-sensing camera on NASA's Mars...

NASA's NEOWISE mission detected comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring on July 28, 2014, less than three months before this comet's close flyby of Mars on Oct. 19. This merging of multiple images presents t...

Marte Vallis, located in Amazonis Planitia, is broad and shallow. The streamlined islands at the top and bottom of the image illustrate this.

This view of an area about 140 kilometers (about 90 miles) wide in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars shows the region around NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

This color-coded map indicates the depth to icy layers at a site in southern Mars. The dense, icy layer retains heat better than the looser soil above it, so where the icy layer is closer to the su...

This movie begins with an animation (artist's rendering) of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft above Mars. The scene zooms into an "X-ray" view of the spacecraft, revealing the High Reso...

This image of a crater in Acidalia Planitia was acquired March 8, 2003, during northern summer.

A small section of Dao Vallis in shown in this VIS image. Dao Vallis is a major channel that drains into Hellas Planitia

This mosaic of daytime infrared images of Gusev Crater, taken by the camera system on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, has been draped over topography data obtained by Mars Global Surveyor.

Sand dunes shaped like blue-black flames lie next to a central hill within an unnamed, 120-kilometer-wide (75-mile-wide) crater in eastern Arabia on Mars.

This lava channel is part of the Elysium Mons flows.

Valleys much younger than well-known ancient valley networks on Mars are evident near the informally named "Heart Lake" on Mars. This map presents color-coded topographical information overlaid ont...

Getting to Mars is difficult enough -- staying there is even more challenging. Odyssey met up with Mars on October 24 02:26 UTC (October 23: 7:26 p.m. PDT/10:26 p.m.EDT).

Bright blue marks a deposit of chloride (salt) minerals in the southern highlands of Mars in this false-color image, which highlights mineral composition differences.

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Mars program Chief Engineer Robert Shotwell describes Mars Odyssey's unprecedented view of comet Siding Spring as the comet sweeps by the Red Planet on Oct. 19 and how it will maneuver to take images.

Buzz Aldrin, an Apollo 11 astronaut who walked on the moon, makes a holographic appearance in 'Destination: Mars,' a mixed-reality tour of a part of Mars that NASA's Curiosity rover has explored.

This computer-generated view based on multiple orbital observations shows Mars' Gale crater as if seen from an aircraft north of the crater.

How do you converse with a robot nearly one hundred million miles away? In this video, Odyssey team members describe communications with the 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft using the antennas of the D...

Spider Web Pattern

Artist's concept of future humans on Mars.

West of Valles Marineris lies a checkerboard named Noctis Labyrinthus, which formed when the Martian crust stretched and fractured.

A sea of dark dunes, sculpted by the wind into long lines, surrounds the northern polar cap covering an area as big as Texas.

A dust storm continues to envelop the Red Planet and Curiosity’s labs are back in action.