This week the NASA folks behind the Curiosity Mars rover mission have published a set of papers which suggest that they’re closer than ever to finding habitable environments on the planet. These findings are pre-emptive in finding actual organic materials, and show how life could maybe, possibly have existed on Mars at one time. Basically […]
NASA isn’t immune to software glitches that can cause some of its incredibly expensive hardware to stop functioning. Such was the case about a week ago when a software update caused a fault on the Curiosity Mars rover, leaving it immobile for almost a week. NASA has announced today that Curiosity is rolling again on its way to the base of the 3.4-mile tall Martian mountain that’s its goal by next spring.
NASA officials say that Curiosity begin moving again early Thursday morning leaving the rocky outcrop called Cooperstown where its been parked during its cross-country trek. Mount Sharp is the ultimate goal destination for Curiosity and is in the middle of Gail Crater.
Curiosity went into safe mode on November 7 after the machine’s internal computer froze while ground controllers were attempting to switch to new upgraded software. There was some sort of discrepancy between a data file and catalog file inside the rover’s computer. Reports indicate that when running on the new R11 software, Curiosity’s catalog file showed data was still written to the computer memory. The computer inside the rover was unable to access that data because the older R10 software handles data differently than the upgraded R11 software. Curiosity was eventually reset and is using the older R10 software while engineers update to R11. It’s just like a Windows update.
“Unfortunately, the handover didn’t work well,” Jim Erickson, Curiosity project manager at JPL, said. “It was a transition problem. We can easily fix this now that we know what the issue is by clearing out the ready-to-send catalog before we switch to R11.”
[via SpaceFlightNow]
NASA has created a beautiful simulation of how Mars might have looked billions of years ago. It’s a fascinating view that looks eerily like Earth. According to NASA:
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One of the main goals of putting the rover Curiosity on the surface of Mars was to help determine if the planet could’ve harbored life in the past, or perhaps still has life on its surface or under. Prior to putting Curiosity on the surface of the red planet, measurements taken from Earth and by […]
We already knew Mars was blanketed in ancient riverbeds, which points to the existence of water in the distant past. What we didn’t know, however, is that H2O exists on Mars in the here and now — albeit embedded in Martian soil. A paper recently published in the journal Science revealed that as much as two percent of dirt from the Red Planet contains the precious liquid. The Curiosity rover gathered samples of the sand from the “Rocknest” area near the Gale Crater back in August of 2012 and delivered it to the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument inside its belly. After heating the sample to around 835 Celsius, SAM was able to detect a surprising amount of carbonate materials, which are formed in the presence of water.
Laurie Leshin, dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the study’s lead author said the findings are conclusive: “If you took about a cubic foot of the dirt and heated it up, you’d get a couple of pints of water out of that — a couple of water bottles’ worth that you would take to the gym.” Another SAM discovery is a mineral called perchlorate that could interfere with thyroid functions if ingested. Still, if we could work around that, the findings could prove tremendously useful for future Mars explorers. “When we send people,” Leshin said in the paper, “they could scoop up the soil anywhere on the surface, heat it just a bit, and obtain water.” We’re likely years away from having fishing expeditions in Mars, of course, but this does soften the blow about the possible lack of life.
Via: Science Daily
Source: Science
NASA’s Curiosity rover has been having quite the time on Mars over the past year. Just last September, Curiosity found evidence of water on the red planet, and this summer, traces of “drinkable water” was found on Mars. Considering how important water is for life on Earth to survive, these were pretty big discoveries, but Curiosity’s recent discovery trumps them in comparison. (more…)
NASA’s Curiosity Rover Discovers Mars’ Soil Is 2% Water original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Just when you thought ol’ Curiosity was digging in for the winter, the little discovery machine came up with a doozy: It discovered water in Martian soil. NASA scientists just published five papers in Science detailing the experiments that led to the discovery. That’s right. There’s water on Mars.
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[Click] Hi, is that David Bowie?
[Silence] …
It’s NASA here. We’ve got some news. While it’s not a conclusive answer, the Curiosity Rover wasn’t able to detect any traces of methane in the Gale Crater. Presence of the gas is one of the things that we were hoping would support our theories about life on Mars, so this comes as a bit of a blow. Now, there *are* terrestrial microbes that don’t generate methane, so it’s not as if this is a firm “no,” but it’s not looking anywhere near as likely as it was before. So, uh, does that help at all?
[Silence] …
Uh, well, thanks. Bye!
[Click]
Thanks to Curiosity’s lonely existence, we just got the clearest, most detailed images of a solar eclipse that’s ever been taken from the surface of Mars—at least, the clearest images ever taken by humans.
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As you may know, yesterday was Curiosity’s one-year anniversary
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