posted 08-17-2012 07:27 PM               

Another new video, of the heat shield impact.

posted 08-29-2012 07:09 PM               

• The Two Moons of Mars as Seen from Mars
  
• Two Moons and the Pleiades from Mars
  
• The Two Moons of Mars As Seen from "Husband Hill"

posted 09-10-2012 11:06 AM               

For all the hopes NASA has pinned on the rover it deposited on Mars last month, one wish has gone unspoken: Please don't find water.

Scientists don't believe they will. They chose the cold, dry equatorial landing site in Mars' Gale Crater for its geology, not its prospects for harboring water or ice, which exist elsewhere on the planet.

But if by chance the rover Curiosity does find H2O, a controversy that has simmered at NASA for nearly a year will burst into the open. Curiosity's drill bits may be contaminated with Earth microbes. If they are, and if those bits touch water, the organisms could survive.

posted 10-03-2012 10:54 AM               

The finding was indeed big news when it happened ...even on the TV news. I would assume that Robert would have done a feature story on it had he not been so busy with his excellent coverage of Endeavour's ferry flight.

While it was exciting, I honestly didn't find it very surprising. The team selected the site fully expecting to find something like this based upon the evidence from overhead photos. Water ice has already been found in the polar region.

Chad Myers on CNN gets very excited about this stuff and does a great job communicating the importance to viewers. However, he went a little overboard during the landing coverage when he virtually guaranteed that Curiosity would find evidence of life there. I think he may have even tossed around the phrase "dinosaur bones"

posted 10-03-2012 11:02 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by 328KF:
I would assume that Robert would have done a feature story on it had he not been so busy with his excellent coverage of Endeavour's ferry flight.

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posted 11-21-2012 12:15 PM               

"As for history books, the whole mission is for the history books," he wrote. That's not to say he rules out the possibility of truly big news. "It won't be earthshaking," he said in a later phone call, "but it will be interesting."

And as for the scoop the NPR reporter and [Huffington Post] announced? "John [Grotzinger] was excited about the quality and range of information coming in from SAM during the day a reporter happened to be sitting in John’s office last week," Webster wrote. "He has been similarly excited by results at other points during the mission so far."

posted 11-28-2012 07:11 AM               

Fossils? Living microbial Martians? Maybe the carbon-based molecules known as organics, which are the building blocks of life? That so much excitement could be set off by a passing hint reflects the enduring fascination of both scientists and nonscientists with Mars.

"It could be all kinds of things," said Peter H. Smith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who was the principal investigator for NASA's earlier Phoenix Mars mission but is not involved with Curiosity. "If it's historic, I think it's organics. That would be historic in my book."

Dr. Grotzinger and other Curiosity scientists will announce their latest findings on Monday in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Do not expect pictures of Martians, though.

Guy Webster, a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which operates Curiosity, said the findings would be "interesting" rather than "earthshaking."

Mr. Webster noted that "a really big announcement," if one should occur, would most likely be made at NASA headquarters in Washington and not at an academic conference.

posted 11-28-2012 11:12 AM               

The quote heard around the world came shortly after Grotzinger explained that NASA had just received the initial data from Curiosity's first soil experiment using a new Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which is capable of identifying organic compounds.

Naturally, the public assumed that this meant Curiosity had discovered a complex organic molecule. But while NASA does have the latest soil samples, the mission team tells Mashable that researchers haven't determined that particular groundbreaking discovery. In fact the rover drove away from the location just five days later, taking more samples along the way.

What Grotzinger was actually trying to convey is that Curiosity's data over her entire two-year mission will further our knowledge of Mars more than ever before, making it a historical mission.

...As for Grotzinger's comment about checking and re-checking the data before releasing it to the public, that's just standard scientific procedure. This is especially true when it's the first set of data from a new instrument.

posted 11-30-2012 12:02 AM               

The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 3, in San Francisco at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover's full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds -- carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.

The Mars Science Laboratory Project and its Curiosity rover are less than four months into a two-year prime mission to investigate whether conditions in Mars' Gale Crater may have been favorable for microbial life. Curiosity is exceeding all expectations for a new mission with all of the instruments and measurement systems performing well. This is spectacular for such a complex system, and one that is operated so far away on Mars by people here on planet Earth. The mission already has found an ancient riverbed on the Red Planet, and there is every expectation for remarkable discoveries still to come.

posted 12-03-2012 11:22 AM               

"We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater," said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

posted 12-03-2012 06:03 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by SkyMan1958:
...words like earth-shaking should not be used around the press

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"You have to be careful about what you say and even more careful about how you say it."

"We're doing science at the speed of science in a world that goes at the speed of Instagrams. The enthusiasm that our team has is just misunderstood."

posted 04-27-2013 08:35 AM               

But this picture isn't the product of a bored (or filthy-minded) rover driver, and it wasn't beamed down recently. It's part of a classic nine-year-old panorama from NASA's Spirit rover, looking back toward its landing platform. (You can actually see the platform in the high-resolution version of the panorama.)

This type of rover wheel-track pattern, which could euphemistically be called "a bat and two balls," has been left on Mars many times, not only by Spirit (which gave up the ghost in 2010 or so), but also by Opportunity (which is still going strong more than nine years after landing on Mars) and Curiosity (which landed last year).

All those rovers have six wheels, three on each side, and they leave behind two parallel tracks when they're traveling in a straight line. When the rover has to make a turn, the wheels rotate in place to put the robot in the desired direction for the next leg of its trek. If the turn is significant enough, you get a nice set of circles at the end of a pair of parallel tracks.

posted 04-27-2013 04:27 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by gliderpilotuk:
Accident or a prank?

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posted 08-05-2013 04:28 PM               

Happy Birthday, Curiosity!

NASA's Curiosity rover celebrates its Martian birthday on August 5 (PDT), the day that it landed on Mars. In honor of this special occasion, engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center are using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument to "sing" Happy Birthday to Curiosity.

posted 04-08-2014 01:20 PM               

A NASA camera on Mars has captured what appears to be artificial light emanating outward from the planet's surface.

The photo, beamed millions of miles from Mars to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was taken last week, apparently by one of two NASA rovers on the red planet.

Although the space agency hasn't issued any official statement yet about the phenomenon, bloggers and NASA enthusiasts have started chiming in.

posted 04-08-2014 01:43 PM               

[Justin Maki, an imaging scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is the lead for Curiosity's engineering cameras] isn't writing off the phenomenon as a double-shot of cosmic rays or data dropouts — even though other experts went to that explanation immediately. In his view, that spot of light really did enter Curiosity's right-hand navigation camera, even though there's no sign of the spot in the stereo imagery from the left-hand camera.

Instead, Maki and his colleagues think it's either a well-placed flash of reflected sunlight, or light shining through a chink in Curiosity's camera housing.

posted 04-10-2014 04:57 PM            

More info here.