• Curiosity rover drills into second Mars rock

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

    NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drilled into this rock target, "Cumberland," on Sunday, collecting a powdered sample of material from the rock's interior. Analysis of the Cumberland sample will check results from "John Klein," the first rock..

    By Mike Wall
    Space.com

    NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has broken out its trusty drill again, pulling samples from deep within a Red Planet rock for the second time ever.

    The 1-ton Curiosity rover bored 2.6 inches (6.6 centimeters) into a rock dubbed "Cumberland" on Sunday, NASA officials said. The resulting powdered sample will be delivered to the robot's onboard science instruments in the coming days.

    Curiosity first used its drill to collect samples back in February, boring into a nearby rock called "John Klein." That operation revealed that ancient Mars was likely capable of supporting microbial life — a groundbreaking discovery that the mission team wants to confirm.

    "The science team expects to use analysis of material from Cumberland to check findings from John Klein," NASA officials wrote in a mission update Monday.

    Curiosity touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater last August, kicking off a two-year surface mission to investigate the Red Planet's past and present habitability. It has spent the time since then close to its landing site, putting just 2,300 feet (700 meters) on its odometer thus far.

    But the six-wheeled robot will soon start making some serious tracks. Curiosity's ultimate destination is the base of Mount Sharp, a mysterious mountain that rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) into the Martian sky from Gale Crater's center.

    Mount Sharp's foothills show signs of past exposure to liquid water. Further, mission scientists want Curiosity to read Mars' changing environmental history like a book as it climbs through the many layers comprising the mountain's lower reaches.

    Curiosity will likely start heading to Mount Sharp's base after it finishes analyzing the Cumberland samples and wraps up a few other high-priority science operations in the area, NASA officials said. The 5-mile (8 km) journey is expected the take months, as Curiosity's top speed across hard, flat ground is about 0.09 mph (0.14 km/h).

    Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Mars rover Curiosity gets next target for drilling

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

    This patch of bedrock, called "Cumberland," has been picked as the next drilling target for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity.

    By Mike Wall
    Space.com

    NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will perform its second-ever drilling operation soon, boring into a knobby section of bedrock dubbed "Cumberland," space agency officials announced Thursday.

    Cumberland lies just 9 feet (2.75 meters) west of the rock called "John Klein," where Curiosity drilled a 2.5-inch-deep (6.4 centimeters) hole back in February. The rover's analysis of John Klein samples allowed mission scientists to conclude that Mars was capable of supporting microbial life billions of years ago.

    The main purpose of drilling a second hole nearby is to confirm this big discovery, researchers said. [Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Life (Photos)]

    "Primarily, it will be to duplicate the results from the first hole, because they were so exciting and, in some cases, unexpected that the people who run the experiments just want to make sure it's really correct before writing all the papers up," Curiosity deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Space.com earlier this week.

    The Curiosity rover will make the short drive to Cumberland in the coming days, NASA officials said. Like John Klein, the rock shows many signs of exposure to liquid water in the distant past. For example, both rocks are shot through with mineral veins and studded with erosion-resistant bumps.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona

    This map shows the location of "Cumberland," the second rock-drilling target for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, in relation to the rover's first drilling target, "John Klein."

    "The bumps are concretions, or clumps of minerals, which formed when water soaked the rock long ago," NASA officials wrote in an update Thursday. "Analysis of a sample containing more material from these concretions could provide information about the variability within the rock layer that includes both John Klein and Cumberland."

    After Curiosity finishes drilling at Cumberland and wraps up a few other science operations nearby, the rover will likely begin the 5-mile (8 kilometers) trek to the base of Mount Sharp, officials said. 

    This mysterious mountain rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the Martian sky from the center of Gale Crater, where Curiosity touched down last August. Mount Sharp's foothills are the rover's ultimate science destination.

    The mountain's base shows signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water, providing an intriguing target. The mission team also wants Curiosity to read the Red Planet's environmental history like a book as it climbs up Mount Sharp's lower reaches.

    Drilling at Cumberland will be Curiosity's first big science operation in a while. Mission controllers didn't send any commands to Curiosity for most of April, because Earth and Mars were on opposite sides of the sun from each other in an alignment known as a Mars solar conjunction.

    Curiosity monitored Red Planet radiation and weather during conjunction and also performed some other relatively simple science tasks using a set of commands sent up in advance, Vasavada said.

    Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • On Earth and in space, it's Yuri's Night!

    ESA

    On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space when he launched into orbit on the Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft (Vostok 1).

    By Miriam Kramer
    Space.com

    Space enthusiasts unite! Friday night, a 1-ton rover on Mars will celebrate 52 years of human spaceflight from the Red Planet while space groupies on Earth party the night away.

    "Yuri's Night" honors more than five decades of human spaceflight with parties and special events commemorating a very special day in the history of human voyages into orbit. NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is getting in on the celebratory action this year as well with a festive message scheduled to beam down via social media at 4:00 p.m. EDT Friday. 

    On April 12, 1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space when he launched off planet Earth in a Vostok space capsule. On the same day in 1981, NASA launched its first shuttle mission, kicking off a 30-year spaceflight program that led to the International Space Station. [Photos: Yuri Gagarin, First Man in Space]

    "We're honored to be working with the Curiosity team to take the celebration of space to new heights," Ryan Kobrick, the executive director of Yuri's Night, said. "As we continue to reach for the stars and inspire others to do the same, we're looking forward to this being the first of many Yuri's Night parties to be held on other planets."

    More than 320 parties in 50 different countries on Earth have been registered through the Yuri's Night's website, including at least one in Antarctica, said Yuri's Night spokesman Brice Russ.

    The special night is also being celebrated by astronauts living far above the Earth's surface.

    "I'm really glad to be with you on Yuri's Night, the day — no matter where we are — where we come together to celebrate the past, the present and the future and the future of human space exploration," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, the space station's current commander, said in a video message to mark the occasion.

    Gagarin's first flight was 108 minutes — much less than the six months astronauts such as Hadfield spend on board the space station — but it catapulted him into the history books. Gagarin's Vostok 1 spacecraft orbited once around the planet before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. The capsule had no way to slow itself down, so Gagarin ejected and floated to the planet's surface using a parachute instead.

    Exactly 20 years later, NASA launched its first space shuttle mission. The space shuttle Columbia's first trip to space (dubbed STS-1) took two astronauts — commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen — into orbit for two days. During the 54.5-hour mission, the shuttle orbited the Earth 37 times before touching down on April 14.

    NASA's space shuttles launched on 135 missions to pursue science and space station-building missions. There were two devastating failures: the 1986 Challenger shuttle accident that killed seven astronauts just after launch; and the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster that killed seven astronauts returning home from orbit after a 16-day mission. .

    The Columbia shuttle disaster led NASA to eventually retire its space shuttle fleet in 2011 after completing the shuttle fleet's obligations to space station construction. The space agency's remaining shuttles — Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour and the test shuttle Enterprise — are now in museums for public display across the United States.

    NASA now is developing a new spacecraft and rocket, the Orion capsule and giant Space Launch System mega-rocket, aimed at launching astronauts on deep-space missions to an asteroid and Mars, beginning in 2021. In the meantime, the agency plans to rely on new private spaceships to ferry Americans to and from the International Space Station.

    To find a "Yuri's Night" party near you, you can use the "Find a Party" page through the Yuri's Night website.

    Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • NASA spacecraft take spring break at Mars

    NASA / JPL-Caltech

    This diagram illustrates the positions of Mars, Earth and the sun during a period that occurs about every 26 months, when Mars passes almost directly behind the sun from Earth's perspective. This arrangement, and the period during which it occurs, is called Mars solar conjunction.

    By Mike Wall
    Space.com

    NASA's robotic Mars explorers are taking a cosmic break for the next few weeks, thanks to an unfavorable planetary alignment of Mars, the Earth and the sun.

    Mission controllers won't send any commands to the agency's Opportunity rover, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) or Mars Odyssey orbiter from Tuesday through April 26. The blackout is even longer for NASA's car-size Curiosity rover, which is slated to go solo from April 4 through May 1.

    The cause of the communications moratorium is a phenomenon called a Mars solar conjunction, during which the sun comes between Earth and the Red Planet. Our star can disrupt and degrade interplanetary signals in this formation, so mission teams won't be taking any chances.

    "Receiving a partial command could confuse the spacecraft, putting them in grave danger," NASA officials explain in a video posted last month by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. [The Boldest Mars Missions in History]

    Opportunity and Curiosity will continue performing stationary science work, using commands already beamed to the rovers. Curiosity will focus on gathering weather data, assessing the Martian radiation environment and searching for signs of subsurface water and hydrated minerals, officials said Monday.

    MRO and Odyssey will also keep studying the Red Planet from above, and they'll continue to serve as communications links between the rovers and Earth. The conjunction will also affect the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, officials have said.

    Odyssey will send rover data home as usual during conjunction, though the orbiter may have to relay information multiple times due to dropouts. MRO, on the other hand, entered record-only mode on April 4. The spacecraft will probably have about 52 gigabits of data to relay when it's ready to start transmitting again on May 1, MRO officials have said.

    Mars solar conjunctions occur every 26 months, so NASA's Red Planet veterans have dealt with them before. This is the fifth conjunction for Opportunity, in fact, and the sixth for Odyssey, which began orbiting Mars in 2001.

    But it'll be the first for Curiosity, which touched down on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

    "The biggest difference for this 2013 conjunction is having Curiosity on Mars," Odyssey mission manager Chris Potts, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement last month.

    Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

     

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Readings from NASA's Curiosity rover show how Mars is losing its air

    NASA

    An artist's conception shows how Mars' atmosphere might have been stripped away by a stream of electrically charged particles from the sun.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Scientists say new readings from NASA's Curiosity rover have confirmed how Mars lost its once-thick atmosphere.

    The measurements from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM, provide fresh support for the view that a high-velocity stream of electrically charged particles from the sun has been stripping off Mars' atmosphere from the top. Mars is more vulnerable to that kind of atmospheric loss than Earth because it doesn't have a global magnetic field to serve as a shield against the solar wind.

    Today, Mars' atmosphere is only 1 percent as dense as of Earth's on the surface, and consists mostly of carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is so thin that warmed-up ice turns directly into water vapor without passing through a liquid state. But scientists have seen geological evidence that water flowed abundantly over parts of the Red Planet billions of years ago. That implies that the atmospheric pressure was once much more Earthlike. So where did the missing air go?

    Curiosity's science team presented the verdict from SAM on Monday during the European Geosciences Union's General Assembly in Vienna. The key clue is a precise measurement of various isotopes of argon, an inert gas that exists in trace amounts in the Martian atmosphere. Different isotopes of the same element have different atomic weights, and SAM was able to distinguish between those weights with unprecedented precision.

    SAM's science team determined that the Martian atmosphere contains more of a lighter argon isotope (argon-36) than a heavier isotope (argon-38) — about four times as much. However, that ratio is lower than the solar system's original ratio of 5.5-to-1, as estimated from argon-isotope measurements of the sun and Jupiter. That would favor a process that stripped away Mars' ancient atmosphere from the top down, with more of the lighter isotopes of gases blown away.

    Scientists have long suspected that the solar wind was the culprit for atmospheric loss, based on what happened to other isotopes in Martian air. But the argon measurements are more conclusive, because argon doesn't react with other elements. Thus, Curiosity's team could exclude a scenario in which constituents of the Martian atmosphere were removed by reacting with surface chemicals.

    "We found arguably the clearest and most robust signature of atmospheric loss on Mars," Sushil Atreya, a SAM co-investigator at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said in a NASA news release.

    Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

    Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

    Launch slideshow

    More about Mars:

    For more about the SAM team's findings, check out this report from the BBC's Jonathan Amos.

     Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Curiosity going solo on Mars for first time

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

    The location of a rock target called "Knorr" is indicated on this self-portrait of the Curiosity rover in the "Yellowknife Bay" area. The photo is a mosaic of images taken by Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager camera.

    By Mike Wall
    Space.com

    NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will be on its own for the first time over the next four weeks, thanks to an unfavorable alignment of the Red Planet, Earth and the sun.

    Curiosity's handlers don't plan to send any commands to the car-size robot from Thursday through May 1. The sun comes between Earth and the Red Planet during this time, in a formation known as a Mars solar conjunction.

    "The (communications) moratorium is a precaution against possible interference by the sun corrupting a command sent to the rover," NASA officials wrote last week in a Curiosity rover mission update.

    While some mission team members may take advantage of the break to lie on a beach somewhere, Curiosity itself won't necessarily be idle. The 1-ton rover can continue doing stationary science work at a site known as Yellowknife Bay using commands sent up in advance, officials have said. [How NASA Deals with a Mars Solar Conjunction (Video)]

    NASA's other active Mars spacecraft — the Opportunity rover, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey orbiter — will also go solo during conjunction, though for shorter periods of time. These robotic explorers won't receive any new commands from April 9 through April 26.

    MRO and Mars Odyssey help relay data from Opportunity and Curiosity to Earth. MRO goes into a four-week-long record-only mode today, but Odyssey will keep sending rover information home throughout conjunction, helping engineers keep tabs on Opportunity and Curiosity.

    "We will maintain visibility of rover status two ways," Torsten Zorn, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement last month. Zorn is conjunction planning leader for Curiosity's engineering operations team. "First, Curiosity will be sending daily beeps directly to Earth. Our second line of visibility is in the Odyssey relays."

    Mars solar conjunctions come around every 26 months, so veterans of NASA's various Mars campaigns are used to dealing with them. Opportunity is weathering its fifth conjunction, for example, and Odyssey its sixth.

    But this will be the first conjunction experience for Curiosity, which landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater this past August to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life.

    The Curiosity team has already achieved its main mission goal, announcing last month that the Yellowknife Bay area was a wet, habitable environment — perhaps a lake — billions of years ago. Researchers came to this conclusion after studying analyses Curiosity performed of material drilled from deep within an outcrop in early February.

    The rover team wants to drill another rock to confirm and extend what Curiosity has already observed. But this second drilling operation won't take place until after conjunction, officials have said.

    Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Parachute flaps in the Martian breeze

    The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been snapping pictures of the Curiosity rover parachute that was discarded on the Martian surface. Credit: NASA / MRO / HiRISE.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    NASA's Curiosity and Opportunity rovers aren't the only human-made objects that have been on the move on Mars: The Red Planet's winds have set Curiosity's discarded parachute rolling around on the surface, as seen in a series of images captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter over the course of five months.

    The 65-foot-wide (20-meter-wide) parachute and the rover's protective backshell were thrown clear of the rover while it descended to its historic landing in Mars' Gale Crater last August. For a few weeks thereafter, they pretty much stayed where they were. But by the end of November, the orbiter's sharp-eyed HiRISE camera picked up changes in the parachute's shape and position. What's more, the dark marks left on the Martian surface by the backshell's impact started fading away.

    The fading of the dark streaks could be explained by the deposition of airborne dust, according to the University of Arizona's Alfred McEwen, who heads the HiRISE science team. The winds that whip through Mars' thin atmosphere are also thought to be responsible for the parachute's changing position.

    "This type of motion may kick off dust and keep parachutes on the surface bright, to help explain why the parachute from Viking 1 (landed in 1976) remains detectable," McEwen wrote in Wednesday's image advisory.

    If you have red-blue glasses, check out this 3-D view of the parachute and the backshell.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona

    A color picture from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Curiosity rover's parachute and backshell spread out on the Martian surface.

    Although the parachute may be on the move, Curiosity itself is definitely staying put for the rest of the month: Mars and Earth are on directly opposite sides of the sun, which interferes with radio communication. As a result, NASA will suspend sending commands to the rover starting on Thursday. Opportunity, MRO and the Mars Odyssey orbiter will be out of radio contact for most of April as well. Curiosity and Opportunity will be executing pre-programmed commands to continue their scientific work, and both rovers are expected to be back on the move in May.

    More about Mars:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Mars rover resumes rock analysis after glitch

    © Nasa / Reuters

    NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, shown on Feb. 3, 2013, resumed its work on Monday.

    Reuters

    CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — NASA's Mars rover Curiosity resumed analysis of a sample of rock powder following a computer glitch that suspended operations for a week, scientists said on Monday.

    Before the computer problem, results radioed back to Earth revealed that the rock, located near Curiosity's Gale Crater landing site, contains all the chemical ingredients necessary for microbial life, the over-arching goal of the planned two-year mission.

    Scientists are eager for additional information about the rock sample, which was drilled out from what appears to be a slab of bedrock in an area known as Yellowknife Bay.

    Curiosity automatically suspended its work on March 17 when it detected a problem with a computer data file. The glitch occurred as the rover was recovering from an earlier, unrelated computer problem.

    The unplanned work hiatus ended over the weekend, NASA's deputy project manager Jim Erickson said.

    "It's a slow recovery process, but we're back doing science," Erickson said.

    Analysis of the rock powder will continue for about another week. Beginning April 4, radio communications between Earth and Mars will be blocked by the sun for a month, suspending most of the rover's science operations again.

    When the planets re-align for communications after May 1, scientists plan to drill a second hole into the rock to verify the early results and look more closely for signs of organic carbon.

    The $2.5 billion rover landed on Mars on Aug. 6 to assess if the planet most like Earth has or ever had the chemical ingredients and environments for microbial life.

    Scientists eventually plan to drive the rover to a 3-mile high mound of what appears to be layered sediment rising from the floor of Gale Crater.

    (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2013. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp 

  • Mars Curiosity rover gets back to sending snapshots

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / Marco Di Lorenzo / Ken Kremer

    The Curiosity rover's instrument-laden robotic arm is front and center in this mosaic view captured by the Mars rover's NavCam system and assembled by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer. The colorized black-and-white imagery was captured on March 23. Click on the image to see the full panorama.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    After a week of down time due to a computer glitch, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover is once again sending back pictures of its rocky Red Planet locale at Yellowknife Bay. In this fresh panorama, the rover looks as if it's sticking its drill-equipped robotic arm right in your face.

    "That drill is hungry, looking for something tasty to eat, and 'you' (loaded with water and organics) are it," jokes scientist-writer Ken Kremer, who collaborated with Italian colleague Marco Di Lorenzo to assemble the panorama.

    Curiosity's percussive drill played a key role in the science team's most recently reported breakthrough: the finding that powder drilled out of a Martian rock contained the chemical traces of a life-friendly environment that existed on Mars billions of years ago. The team's chemical analysis of the powder indicated that the minerals were probably formed in the presence of drinkable water.

    That kind of water no longer exists in liquid form on the Martian surface. The place where Curiosity is currently working may have once been in the vicinity of a riverbed, but it's now a cold and dry wasteland of sand and rock. In the weeks to come, Curiosity's scientists plan to drill into the rock again, looking for confirmatory clues about the potentially habitable environment in the Red Planet's past.

    The plan has been held up due to a series of minor setbacks — including a memory failure that may have been due to a cosmic-ray strike, a precautionary stand-down to weather a solar storm, and most recently a computer file glitch that put the rover into safe mode. The Curiosity team has been carefully bringing the rover back to full operation, and this picture is presumably part of the checkout process.

    It won't be long before the rover will once more have to reduce its contact with its handlers back on Earth, due to an Earth-Mars-sun conjunction that will interfere with radio signaling. Curiosity's communication gap is expected to last from April 4 to May 1, as detailed in a mission update from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. During the break, Curiosity is expected to carry on with its experiments, but the transmission of science data and images will have to wait until May. So let's enjoy these fresh images while we can.

    For more of Curiosity's raw imagery, check out the galleries on JPL's Mars Science Laboratory website. You'll also find great pictures on UnmannedSpaceflight.com, where Kremer, Di Lorenzo and other image-processing gurus post their work. If you have 3-D glasses, whip 'em out and take a look at Ed Truthan's red-blue view of Curiosity's first drilling site.

    Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

    Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

    Launch slideshow

    More about Mars:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log and the rest of NBCNews.com's science and space coverage, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • NASA's Mars Curiosity rover revived after glitch – and readied for science

    Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

    Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

    Launch slideshow

    By Mike Wall
    Space.com

    NASA's Curiosity rover is back in action on Mars after being sidelined by a computer glitch for the second time in three weeks.

    Curiosity went into a precautionary "safe mode" on Sunday, apparently because a file slated for deletion was connected to one still in use by the rover. But the mission team has now sorted things out and returned the robot to active status, NASA officials announced Tuesday.

    The car-size Curiosity rover has not resumed science operations yet, however. It's still recovering from a separate memory glitch that knocked out its main, or A-side, computer in late February. Engineers swapped Curiosity over to its backup (B-side) computer at the time, spurring the rover to go into safe mode on Feb. 28.

    Curiosity bounced back on March 2, only to stand down briefly once again a few days later to wait out a Mars-bound solar eruption. [Curiosity Rover's Latest Amazing Mars Photos]

    Mission engineers continue to configure and check out the B-side computer, which remains the Curiosity rover's active computer. The A-side is now available as a backup if needed, officials said.

    All of this drama has delayed Curiosity's activities at a Martian site called Yellowknife Bay, which mission scientists announced last week could have supported microbial life. This discovery was based on Curiosity's study of material pulled out of a hole it drilled last month into a Yellowknife Bay rock. Further such analytical work should be possible soon, rover team members said.

    "We expect to get back to sample-analysis science by the end of the week," Curiosity mission manager Jennifer Trosper, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.

    The rover team also wants to drill another hole in the Yellowknife Bay area to confirm and extend their previous observations. But this won't happen until May, partly because of an upcoming unfavorable planetary alignment.

    Engineers won't send commands to the six-wheeled robot for most of April, because Mars and Earth will be on opposite sides of the sun during this time. "The moratorium is a precaution against interference by the sun corrupting a command sent to the rover," NASA officials wrote in a mission update.

    Curiosity is the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission. The huge robot touched down inside Mars' Gale Crater last August, kicking off a planned two-year surface mission to determine if the area ever could have supported microbial life.

    While Curiosity has already achieved its main mission goal, the rover's handlers have no desire to rest on their laurels. They still plan to send Curiosity on to its main science destination — the base of 3-mile-high (5 kilometers) Mount Sharp — when it's done at Yellowknife.

    Mount Sharp's foothills, which lie about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the rover at present, show signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water. The mountain's many layers also contain a record of how Mars' environmental conditions have changed over time, and researchers want Curiosity to read these layers like a book as it climbs up Mount Sharp's slopes.

    Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • How a rover's Martian mountain would look on Earth

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

    This mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows Mount Sharp, also known as Aeolis Mons, in a white-balanced color adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earthlike lighting. This is just a small segment of a wider panorama assembled from image data collected on Sept. 20, 2012. The sky has been filled out by extrapolating color and brightness information from the portions of the sky that were captured in images of the terrain. A raw-color version of the mosaic shows the scene's colors as they would look in a typical smartphone camera photo taken on Mars. Click on the image to see a larger version from NASA.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    If you could pull up a 3-mile-high mountain from Mars and plop it down in California's Mojave Desert, it'd probably look much like this latest color panorama from the Curiosity rover's science team. This little piece from the panorama doesn't do justice to the whole picture: You really should see the whole thing at high resolution to get a sense of just how much Mount Sharp, a.k.a. Aeolis Mons, looms over the scene where NASA's six-wheeled robotic lab has been working.

    The most jarring thing about the picture is the blue sky. No, the Martian sky doesn't really look like that. The Red Planet's atmosphere is filled with iron-rich dust that turns everything into shades of butterscotch, burnt orange and brick. To see Mount Sharp as you or your smartphone camera might see it if you were actually there, check out this true-color version of the panorama.

    The blue-sky version has been processed to reflect a white-balanced view, as if the picture were taken in an earthly rather than a Martian setting. Why would scientists bother with a phony view of Mars? "White-balancing helps scientists recognize rock materials based on their experience looking at rocks on Earth," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in Friday's photo advisory. It's as if Curiosity was able to get rid of all that red dust in the air and take a clear picture of the mountainside from miles away.

    The pictures for this panorama was taken in September, while the rover was en route to its first destination. For the past couple of months, Curiosity has been studying the rocks at a site known as Yellowknife Bay, and it's already turned up some amazing discoveries about Mars' past — including evidence that the area was capable of supporting microbial life billions of years ago.

    Within the next couple of months, Curiosity is due to turn around and begin its 6-mile (10-kilometer) trek to the foothills of that big mountain. Pictures like this panorama will help scientists figure out exactly where their nuclear-powered robotic geologist should be going.

    Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

    Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

    Launch slideshow

    More about Mars:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other science coverage, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • What's next for Mars Curiosity rover

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

    This colorized view is part of a panorama produced by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo from NASA imagery. The picture shows NASA's Curiosity rover putting its drill to work at Yellowknife Bay on Mars. Click on the picture to see a larger version, and visit KenKremer.com for more from Ken Kremer.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Even as the scientists behind NASA's Curiosity rover mission announced that they found evidence of life-friendly chemistry inside a Martian rock, the $2.5 billion mission's engineers continued their efforts to get the rover back into full operation after a serious computer glitch.

    The rover's scientific work in a spot known as Yellowknife Bay has been put on hold while the mission operations team rebuilds the memory for one of Curiosity's two redundant computers, known as the A-side. The A-side computer experienced a memory failure on Feb. 28, forcing controllers to switch over to the B-side backup brain. Since then, the team has been putting the A-side through a series of tests to make sure it's OK.

    "We have been able to store new data in many of the memory locations previously affected and believe more runs will demonstrate more memory is available," Jim Erickson, the mission's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Monday in a status report. A couple of software patches are due to be uploaded and tested this week, and then the team will reassess when to resume full mission operations, including the analysis of additional rock samples.

    Engineers still don't know why the A-side failed, although they suspect it may have been due to a cosmic-ray hit. Such hits are thought to have affected Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the past. After the computer system returns to full redundant mode, the B-side will continue to operate as Curiosity's main computer while the A-side serves as backup, NASA spokesman Guy Webster told NBC News on Wednesday.

    This animation provides a 360-degree spin around the first bore hole drilled by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on Feb. 8. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Marco Di Lorenzo / Ken Kremer (www.kenkremer.com)

    Mars is heading into a solar conjunction in April that will interfere with communications between Curiosity and Mission Control, and science operations will have to be suspended again during that hiatus. That means the rover won't drill out another sample of rock powder from Yellowknife Bay until May.

    Scientists say Yellowknife Bay could have been a riverbed or lake bed in ancient times — just the right kind of place for figuring out what Mars was like billions of years ago.

    "I have an image now of possibly a lake, a freshwater lake on a Mars with probably a thicker atmosphere, maybe a snow-capped Mount Sharp. Who knows?" said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate.

    Curiosity's science team members are so intrigued by what they've been finding that they're willing to go slow with the rover's long-planned trip to Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) peak in the middle of Mars' Gale Crater. The layers of rock that make up that mountain, also known as Aeolis Mons, are thought to preserve Mars' geological record over billions of years.

    "When we start driving to Mount Sharp, and you see us dragging our feet as we go along there and stop to look at a few things, that's because we'll be trying to figure out how the rocks we're at now, at Yellowknife Bay, relate to Mount Sharp," said Caltech's John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist.

    Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

    Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

    Launch slideshow

    Extra credit: The Mars Curiosity crew is coming in for more accolades. The Mars Science Laboratory Project, which is in charge of building and operating the rover, has been selected to receive the National Air and Space Museum's Trophy for Current Achievement at a ceremony next month. Meanwhile, the folks who manage Mars Curiosity's online persona have won the 2013 South by Southwest Interactive Award for best social media campaign. Congratulations to the "hive mind" behind @MarsCuriosity on Twitter.

    More about Mars:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

     

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