Mars Rover Carries Device for Underground Scouting
An instrument on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity can check for any water that might be bound into shallow underground minerals along the rover's path. The Mars Science Laboratory mission will use 10 instruments on Curiosity to investigate whether the area selected for the mission has ever offered environmental conditions favourable for life and favourable for preserving evidence about life. Read more
NASA will host a two-day launch Tweetup for 150 of its Twitter followers on Nov. 23 and 25 at the agency's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The Tweetup is expected to culminate in the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The launch window is scheduled to open at 7:21 a.m. PST (10:21 a.m. EST) on Nov. 25. Read more
NASA's next Mars rover will land at the foot of a layered mountain inside the planet's Gale Crater.
The car-sized Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, is scheduled to launch late this year and land in August 2012. The target crater spans 154 kilometres in diameter and holds a mountain rising higher from the crater floor than Mount Rainier rises above Seattle. Gale is about the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Layering in the mound suggests it is the surviving remnant of an extensive sequence of deposits. The crater is named for Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale. Read more
NASA and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum will host a news conference at 10 a.m. EDT, Friday, July 22 to announce the selected landing site for the agency's latest Mars rover. The event will be in the museum's Moving Beyond Earth Gallery. NASA Television and the agency's Web site will provide live coverage of the event. Read more
Southern California's high desert has been a stand-in for Mars for NASA technology testing many times over the years. And so it is again, in a series of flights by an F/A-18 aircraft to test the landing radar for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. The flight profile is designed to have the F/A-18 climb to about 12,000 metres. From there, it makes a series of subsonic, stair-step dives at angles of 40 to 90 degrees to simulate what the Mars radar will see while the spacecraft is on a parachute descending through the Martian atmosphere. The F/A-18 pulls out of each dive at about 1,500 metres. Data collected by these flights will be used to finesse the Mars landing radar software, to help ensure that it is calibrated as accurately as possible. Read more
As part of an ongoing NASA initiative, the space organization invited people to submit their names online to be included on a dime-sized microchip to land on the red planet later this year. So far, more than half-a-million Americans have submitted their names, with Californians dominating the list. Last week, Texas overtook Florida for the second place spot. Today is the deadline for submitting names to be etched on the rover, said Michelle Viotti, manager for NASA's Mars public engagement program. Read more
Spacecraft specialists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have been putting the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, through various tests in preparation for shipment to NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida this month. A new set of images online shows the rover manoeuvring its robotic arm and driving in JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility, where it was built. Read more
NASA's inspector general issued a significant list Wednesday of items that need to be resolved before the next mission to Mars can be launched in November. Some say the challenges won't be resolved in time, causing the Mars team to miss their launch window. Read more
Camera Duo on Mars Rover Mast Will Shoot Colour Views
Two digital colour cameras riding high on the mast of NASA's next Mars rover will complement each other in showing the surface of Mars in exquisite detail. They are the left and right eyes of the Mast Camera, or Mastcam, instrument on the Curiosity rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, launching in late 2011. The right-eye Mastcam looks through a telephoto lens, revealing details near or far with about three-fold better resolution than any previous landscape-viewing camera on the surface of Mars. The left-eye Mastcam provides broader context through a medium-angle lens. Each can acquire thousands of full-colour images and store them in an eight-gigabyte flash memory. Both cameras are also capable of recording high-definition video at about eight frames per second. Combining information from the two eyes can yield 3-D views of the telephoto part of the scene. Read more