Mars
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has limbered up its robotic arm, taken a good look at itself and has been given a clean bill of health. It’s now on the move as it starts its two-year mission of discovery on the Red Planet. On Thursday, it traveled 105 feet (32 m) as it seeks out its first rock for serious investigation. Meanwhile, the nuclear-powered explorer sent back images of Mars’s moon Phobos as it passed in front of the Sun. Read More
On Wednesday, NASA’s unmanned Mars rover Curiosity passed another milestone. Having traversed 358 feet (109 m), the 4X4-sized, nuclear-powered explorer is one-quarter of the way from Bradbury landing to it’s first major destination, Glenelg. Now that Curiosity’s mobility system has had the bugs shaken out of it, it’s the arm’s turn to take center stage. Curiosity will spend the next six to ten days testing its 7-foot (2.1 m) arm and the set of tools that make up its “hand.” Read More
Curiosity rolls out, and writes a message on Mars
The NASA Mars rover Curiosity began its mission of exploration this week and as it rolled out, it wrote the place of its birth on the Martian surface. The 4x4-sized unmanned explorer will travel a quarter of a mile (400 m) to an area where it will test its robotic arm and may use its sample-collecting drill for the first time. As it goes along, the treads on Curiosity’s six wheels spell out “JPL” (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) over and over in Morse code. Read More
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has already fired its laser over 500 times as it studies its surroundings as engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) calibrate its sensors. In a classic example of “waste not, want not” Curiosity concentrated its activity on a patch of rocks that were uncovered by the rocket backwash of the sky crane that delivered the unmanned explorer to the Martian surface on August 6. Read More
NASA’s Curiosity rover may be stealing the headlines, but there is other news coming from Mars. Recently, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express probe made a 100-kilometer (62-mile) flyby of the Martian moon Phobos and returned a high-resolution 3D image filled with remarkable detail. The image includes a profile of Stickney crater, which dominates the right-hand side, and the grooves associated with the impact of the asteroid that created it thousands of years ago. Read More
The Curiosity rover has taken its first drive today on Mars. It wasn’t much of a road trip. The unmanned craft went about 15 feet (4.57 m), turned 120 degrees and then reversed about 8 feet (2.43 m). Curiosity is now about 20 feet (6.09 m) from its landing site, now named Bradbury Landing after the late author Ray Bradbury. That may not seem like much, but it was a successful test of Curiosity’s mobility and takes it a step (or a roll) closer to beginning its two-year mission to look for areas where life may have or does exist on the Red Planet. Read More
Feeling very confident after the perfect landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars on August 6th, NASA has announced its next mission to the Red Planet. In 2016, the US space agency will launch the unmanned InSight lander to Mars. Unlike Curiosity, InSight will be a static lander loaded with instruments designed to study the deep geology of Mars and answer such questions as whether the core of the planet is liquid or solid, and why Mars hasn’t any shifting tectonic plates like Earth. Read More
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has fired its laser for the first time. Its target wasn’t attacking Martians, but a 7 cm (2.75 inch) wide rock called “Coronation” (AKA N165) about 10 feet (3 m) from the rover. Curiosity’s laser fired 30 pulses over a ten-second interval, hitting Coronation with one million watts for five-one billionths of a second. As tiny bits of Coronation vaporized into a glowing plasma, Curiosity's ChemCam analyzed the stone’s makeup by means of a telescope and three spectrometers. Read More
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity getting "brain transplant"
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is changing its mind – or rather, NASA is changing Curiosity’s mind for it. The 4X4-sized robot explorer is spending its first weekend on the Red Planet installing a major software update that NASA calls a “brain transplant.” This new software replaces that which Curiosity ran while in transit from Earth and will prepare the rover for exploring the Martian surface. Read More
After a successful landing on Sunday, the NASA rover Curiosity has begun sending back images of the planet including the first color pictures and 3D stereographs. In addition to images from the surface of the red planet, the lander has also sent back images captured by onboard cameras during the craft’s dramatic descent through the Martian atmosphere and landing. Meanwhile, an orbiter from an earlier NASA mission sent back images of Curiosity’s descent. Read More
