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In an effort to avoid problems caused by interference, NASA will temporarily limit scientific observations by its Mars rovers and orbiters beginning Thursday as the Red Planet passes behind the sun as seen from Earth. The sun will appear between Earth and Mars throughout the month of April in a setup known as a Mars solar conjunction, which can interfere with communications between the two planets. Specifically, during these solar conjunctions, solar flares and charged particles being emitted from the sun can disrupt radio communications, and thus could interfere with the stream of data being sent back and forth to...

Rising above the present location of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, higher than any mountain in the 48 contiguous states of the United States, Mount Sharp is featured in new imagery from the rover. > A pair of mosaics assembled from dozens of telephoto images shows Mount Sharp in dramatic detail. The component images were taken by the 100-millimeter-focal-length telephoto lens camera mounted on the right side of Curiosity's remote sensing mast, during the 45th Martian day of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 20, 2012). This layered mound, also called Aeolis Mons, in the center of Gale Crater rises more...

NASA is reporting that an analysis of a rock powder sample collected by the Curiosity rover suggests that ancient Mars could have supported living microbes. The sample contained traces of sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon -- key chemical ingredients for life. For astronomers, the news constitutes the latest clue in their pursuit of a scientific holy grail: Answering the big question about whether life ever existed on the Red Planet. Their challenge until now has been to confirm whether the Martian atmosphere could have supported a habitable environment. The preliminary evidence now suggests the answer is yes...

PASADENA, Calif. - The ground team for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has switched the rover to a redundant onboard computer in response to a memory issue on the computer that had been active. The intentional swap at about 2:30 a.m. PST today (Thursday, Feb. 28) put the rover, as anticipated, into a minimal-activity precautionary status called "safe mode." The team is shifting the rover from safe mode to operational status over the next few days and is troubleshooting the condition that affected operations yesterday. The condition is related to a glitch in flash memory linked to the other, now-inactive, computer.

I found a link to this INTERACTIVE VIEW of the Curiosity Rover on Mars on the ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY ARCHIVE. It is one of the most amazing uses of this technology I have seen. It is like standing beside the Rover on Mars and using a pair of binoculars. Give it a try. It is really fun.

All of Curiosity's instruments have been commissioned. The drill is the only tool that has yet to be deployed. Its hammer action will enable the device to retrieve powdered samples from up to 5cm inside the rock, which can then passed to the rover's onboard laboratories for analysis. As Curiosity trundled through Yellowknife Bay in December, it used its survey instruments to try to identify the most promising candidate rock. This equipment comprises the mast-mounted colour cameras and laser spectrometer, and the arm-held "hand lens" camera and X-ray spectrometer. Continue reading the main story Take a trip to Mars Explore...

After years of debate, a mystery with implications for life gets the 'sniff' test. Is there methane on Mars? The question has dogged scientists since 1969, when George Pimentel at the University of California, Berkeley, an instrument leader on NASA's Mariner 7 programme, held a press conference to announce that methane had been detected near Mars’ south polar cap. The revelation came less than 48 hours after his team received the data it was based on; he retracted the finding a month later after realizing that the methane signal was actually coming from carbon dioxide ice. It is easy to...

On the mission's 61st Martian day, or sol (Oct. 7, 2012), NASA's Mars rover Curiosity used its soil scoop for the first time, collecting a scoopful of sand and powdery material at the "Rocknest" site. Imaging verified collection of the sample. The collected material will be used for cleaning interior surfaces of the rover's sample-handling mechanism. It will be held and vibrated inside each chamber of the mechanism before the material is discarded. Curiosity's Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) device, on the robotic arm, includes the scoop and the mechanism for sieving and portioning samples of...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The NASA rover Curiosity has beamed back pictures of bedrock that suggest a fast-moving stream, possibly waist-deep, once flowed on Mars — a find that the mission's chief scientist called exciting.

Truly cool! Mars Curiosity rover snapped a bunch of pics while Phobos eclipsed the sun! Youtube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHDH7cKX_SA&feature=player_embedded

Explanation: Curiosity is on the move across Mars -- but where is it going? The car-sized rover's path after 29 Martian days on the surface is shown on the above map. Curiosity is still almost 300 meters from its first major destination, though, a meeting of different types of terrain called Glenelg and visible on the image right. It may take Curiosity two months or so to get to Glenelg as it stops to inspect interesting rocks or landscape features along the way. The above image was taken about one week ago from high up by the HiRise camera onboard...

Wheels and a Destination This view of the three left wheels of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity combines two images that were taken by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 34th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Sept. 9, 2012). In the distance is the lower slope of Mount Sharp. The camera is located in the turret of tools at the end of Curiosity's robotic arm. The Sol 34 imaging by MAHLI was part of a week-long set of activities for characterizing the movement of the arm in Mars conditions. The main purpose of Curiosity's...

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 water, 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...

NASA’s Curiosity Rover snapped photographs at 5 frames per second as it descended onto the face of Mars a few weeks ago. The footage that results when the images are combined into a 15 frame per second HD video is pretty amazing, but apparently not amazing enough for a YouTube user named hahahaspam. He spent four straight days taking the 5 fps footage and interpolating it to 25 frames per second. This means that instead of a video showing the choppy landing at 3 times the actual speed, his video shows the landing smoothly and in real time!

Explanation: What's that on the horizon? The light peak is Mt. Sharp -- an eventual destination of the Curiosity rover. The above image mosaic was taken from Bradbury Landing, the landing spot of Curiosity, and shows in the foreground the rover's extended robotic arm. Curiosity's is already on the move crossing the intermediate gravel field toward an interesting terrain feature named Glenelg. Curiosity has also already started analyzing its surroundings by zapping a nearby rock with its laser to analyze the chemical composition of the resulting gas plume. If life ever existed on Mars it might well have been here...

http://www.wimp.com/curiositydescent/

NASA's new Mars probe lived up to its billing as a rover on Wednesday with a successful first test drive, its first motion since settling down inside an ancient impact basin on Aug. 6. "We built a rover, so unless the rover roves, we really haven’t accomplished anything," project manager Pete Theisinger, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters during a press conference Wednesday. "It's a big moment, a very big moment."

Curiosity has stretched its neck, flexed its arm and wiggled its toes – and it’s set to make its first drive on Mars after engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory send it instructions tonight. But in its self-examination, the Mars Science Laboratory has found more than a small bruise on its one-ton body. Curiosity has been testing its cameras, laser and other functions since landing on the Red Planet on Aug. 5. NASA officials announced Monday that the rover had successfully unfolded its arm. The robotic arm holds what mission manager Michael Watkins called a veritable “Swiss army knife” of tools...

The NASA rover Curiosity has taken its first test drive on Mars. Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Allen Chen on Wednesday tweeted an image of marks left in the soil and declared, "Wheel tracks on Mars." Details of the brief drive are expected to be released at a late-morning news conference. The rover was expected to move forward 10 feet, turn right and back-track close to where it started. Curiosity touched down near the Martian equator earlier this month on a $2.5 billion mission. Scientists plan to drive it to the base of a mountain where it will drill into rocks...

Since the landing of NASA’s newest Mars rover, flight director David Oh’s family has taken the unusual step of tagging along as he leaves Earth time behind and syncs his body clock with the red planet. Every mission to Mars, a small army of scientists and engineers reports to duty on “Mars time” for the first three months. But it’s almost unheard of for an entire family to flip their orderly lives upside down, shifting to what amounts to a time zone change a day. Intrigued about abiding by extraterrestrial time, Oh’s wife, Bryn, could not pass up the chance...