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The Big Picture: Curiosity takes a 'belly selfie' on Mars
You really shouldn't take selfies from a low angle -- it could lead to unflattering images that emphasize double chins, chubby cheeks and big nostrils. That is, unless you're the Curiosity rover, because it still looks good despite showing its belly in the photo above. This is definitely not the rover's first self-portrait, but it's the first one wherein the camera was positioned lower than its body. The image is a composite of 92 photos taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on August 5th as the rover was facing northeast, with Mt. Sharp and the Gale crater visible in the background.
Now you can drive around Mars with NASA's Curiosity simulator
Want to explore the surface of the red planet without signing up for the Mars One mission? No problem: NASA has built two interactive web applications that will let you explore the planet to your heart's content from the comfort of your armchair.
Space drones will collect samples from planets and asteroids
While Curiosity's doing a great job on the red planet, there are still areas it can't go to, such as steep cliffs/hills and locations hidden by permanent shadows. That's why the engineers at NASA Kennedy Space Center's Swamp Works laboratory are developing drones that can withstand harsh conditions on other planets and navigate extraterrestrial terrain. These machines, collectively called "Extreme Access Flyers," will be gathering samples from places rovers can't access and will be charging their batteries/replenishing propellants by perching on a companion lander in between flights.
NASA patched Curiosity rover's autofocus problem over the air
Pardon me while I say something that might not be entirely popular: Software updates are pretty awesome. Maybe not so much for game consoles, but, I digress because the Curiosity rover recently received a patch that improved the autofocus of its "ChemCam" telescope. Over the air. On Mars. Before the update, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory would take nine pictures of a subject (each at a different focus) to get one usable close-up image of any of the Red Planet's rocks and soils, and send them back home. Same goes for any sample analyses the laser was doing. The problem is that for those analyses to be anywhere remotely useful, the telescope projecting said laser needs to be in focus and the workaround in place wasn't very efficient.
Curiosity finds evidence of life-giving nitrates in Mars rocks
NASA's Curiosity rover isn't done finding signs that Mars once had the prime ingredients for life... not by a longshot. The explorer robot has discovered evidence of nitrates, the nitrogen compounds that are some of the key nutrients for life, in rocks at three places near its landing site. This still doesn't mean that Mars did harbor life in its heyday, but it's now that much more likely. The big question is whether the processes that formed those nitrates are still active, or if they died out when the planet became barren -- scientists aren't sure, and it could take a while to get an answer.
Curiosity rover's arm is suffering short circuits, but it's OK
The Curiosity rover's drilling career is in danger. Its robotic arm has been having sporadic short circuits ever since late February. Its issues started on February 27th, when a surge of current shut down the the rover while it was processing some samples. After running a couple of tests, NASA pinpointed the culprit, which is apparently the coil that generates magnetic fields. This coil operates the striker, which, in turn, moves the drill. While unfortunate, the drill will still work even if the coil and the striker completely give out, though it'll only be able to dig through softer surfaces. Don't worry, though: NASA, according to The New York Times, believes this won't affect the mission as a whole. The agency also plans to start drilling with the arm again next week -- fingers crossed its problems are over by then. [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS]
Curiosity learns to drill into Mars rocks without breaking them
It's no secret that scientists want the Curiosity rover to drill into Mars more often. However, it first has to learn how to drill properly -- until now, it was so aggressive that it sometimes broke the rocks it was trying to sample. Thankfully, NASA has a fix. It recently started testing a new drilling algorithm that starts at the lowest power levels and ramps up only if there isn't much progress. This gentler touch appears to be successful in early tests: as you can see above, Curiosity bored into a relatively fragile rock without smashing it to bits. It's too soon to say whether or not the technique will work well in every circumstance, but researchers can at least be confident that they won't destroy crucial evidence before they've had a chance to look at it. Update: NASA has released a Curiosity selfie (below) at its latest drill site showing a lot recent landmarks. [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS]
Barely Related: The Interview didn't go well
Happy holidays, everyone! Welcome to Barely Related, a conversational Friday column that presents the non-gaming news stories that we, the Joystiq staff, have been talking about over the past week. And no, we're not stopping our focus on industry and gaming news. Think of this as your casual weekly recap of interesting (and mostly geeky) news, presented just in time to fill your brain with things to discuss at all of those weekend shindigs. Grab a fresh drink, lean back in your armchair, and get ready to talk nerdy with us.
Curiosity detects organic molecules in Martian atmosphere and soil
NASA's Curiosity rover is still going strong on the red planet, observing the atmosphere and analyzing soil samples for the sake of future missions. For instance, the agency has revealed that the rover has sniffed out sudden methane spikes in the atmosphere sometime in late 2013 and early 2014, coming from somewhere north of the rover's location in the Gale crater. The rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) lab regularly analyzes the air on the planet and has found methane levels to be typically lower than scientists expect. During these sudden spikes, however, these levels are ten times higher than usual.
NASA: Mars' Gale Crater held a huge lake for millions of years
Humans have been speculating about water on Mars for hundreds of years, and now thanks to the Curiosity rover we're getting a better sense of how wet the Red Planet used to be. NASA revealed today that the Gale Crater, the 96-mile wide patch of land Curiosity has been exploring since 2012, held a large lake bed for tens of millions of years. What's more, the agency found that the three-mile high Mount Sharp, which sits in the middle of the crater, was likely formed by sediment deposits from the lake. The big takeaway? Mars was likely warm enough to house liquid water for long periods of time -- perhaps even long enough for life to form. "If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local or only underground on Mars," said Ashwin Vasavada, NASA's Curiosity deputy project scientist. The only problem now is that we still don't know how the Martian atmosphere supported such a wet environment.
India put a satellite in orbit around Mars for a fraction of what NASA spent
India can rightly feel proud of itself today as its Mangalyaan "MOM" satellite mission successfully entered orbit around Mars. In the process, the country has broken at least three records, including being the first Asian nation to reach the red planet and being the first country to get to Mars on the first attempt. Third on that list of achievements is that the project is one of the cheapest exploration projects in recent history, costing just $72 million -- pocket change compared to NASA's $670 million MAVEN probe and the $2 billion Curiosity Rover. India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has even quipped that it cost less to launch the satellite than it cost to make the movie Gravity.
NASA panel says Curiosity needs to drive less and drill more
NASA is not getting its money's worth of Curiosity, according to a review panel looking at seven planetary missions. The senior scientists criticized the nuclear-powered Mars rover, saying it needed to take more than the eight drill samples scheduled for the rest of its mission. It added that Curiosity has done too much driving (which has severely damaged the wheels) and peripheral activities like searching for clouds. As a result, it rated the rover lowest of the seven missions reviewed, despite the fact that it cost the most. Meanwhile, the Jupiter Cassini mission, which has produced a spectacular cache of images and scientific data, received the highest rating and will be extended at least three years. Despite the ranking, Curiosity was still graded "very good" and all seven missions will retain their funding. That includes the indefatigable Opportunity rover, still trucking after a decade.
Mars 2020 rover will give us a way to know the red planet better
NASA's been planning for the Mars 2020 rover for a long time now, back when Curiosity was just making its way to the red planet. Now, the agency has finally chosen seven scientific instruments that'll be equipped on the new rover out of the 58 proposals submitted by researchers from all over the globe. These instruments were chosen based on their potential to discover how humans can live off the extraterrestrial land by using the natural resources available, and also by their capacity to unearth any danger posed by Martian dust to future human explorers.
Curiosity celebrates its first action-packed Martian year
Curiosity feted its first Martian year on the red planet (687 earth days) with a stiched-up selfie while NASA reflected on the Mars rover's triumphs and setbacks. So far, it has achieved most of its mission goals, particularly its quest for evidence that Mars could have supported life. Drilling samples revealed traces of all the elements needed for life, and it spotted a streambed that once had "vigorous" water flow. The rover also found that moisture could be drilled from its soil, and that the radiation levels were safe for humans -- all important details for planned space travel. Unfortunately, due to sharper-than-expected rocks, Curiosity now has a gaping hole in its wheel, which forced the team to change its driving methods and routes. It's not expected to have much impact on the mission, though -- after grabbing samples at a site called Windjana, Curiosity's now headed to Mount Sharp, some 2.4 miles away. With its main goals accomplished, any new science is gravy --- see the video below for more.
Visualized: Curiosity rover takes us back to the surface of Mars
Been a while since you last took a trip to Mars? Once again, photographer Andrew Bodrov has stitched together the latest shots from the Curiosity rover so that you can spend a little time on another world. As before, the 360 Cities controls aren't the most intuitive, but hey -- it's a lot cheaper than building your own space program just for a trip across Holst's favorite planet.
Watch NASA simulate a Mars landing on Earth to test supersonic parachutes
To make sure the (very expensive) equipment we're sending to Mars don't crash into the ground, NASA's putting its huge supersonic parachutes through a grueling test. Wait, what do parachutes have to do with Mars missions anyway? Well, if you read up on the Curiosity rover's risky landing in 2012, you'll see that NASA used a parachute to slow down its descent. That parachute won't work for the bigger things we're bound to send to the red planet in the future, though, so NASA designed a larger one called low-density supersonic decelerator or LDSD. The problem is, it's too big for most of the agency's wind tunnels and locations for testing, prompting the agency to create a special outdoor rig that simulates Martian landing. NASA's contraption is a complex set-up that uses several elements, including a Night Hawk helicopter, hundreds of pounds of weight, a winch, a sled, rockets and a lot of rope. It's like a Rube Goldberg machine, especially since the process needs to go down in sequence, but the end task is nowhere near simple. A huge chunk of the parachute got ripped out in the video below, but since this test was designed to discover flaws, we'd say it was a huge success.
NASA's Curiosity finds two percent of Martian soil is composed of water
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.
Life on Mars cast into doubt as Curiosity fails to find methane
[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]
Peter Molyneux talks royalties and offline play for Godus
Bryan Henderson, the winner of Peter Molyneux's Curiosity experiment, will be receiving a "financially worthwhile" percentage of the game's profits when he takes on the (temporary) role of god of gods in Godus, Molyneux recently told Rock, Paper, Shotgun. "The first game that I did, I think I got less than 5 percent royalties from it," Molyneux said. "I'm not saying he has 5 percent royalties. But it's more than a percent." Godus will be available to play offline. Molyneux told RPS that if he were to say the game was always online, "this red dot would appear on my forehead and I'd be sniped to death." Molyneux cautioned, however, that playing offline removes the game's most "charming" features, like syncing with a villager's social feed. "My wife tweets and it comes up in the world," Molyneux explained. "It's a stupid feature. It's just a piece of text. But you end up ... caring for your little people, because they love you so much." Early access for Godus will be available on Steam on September 13, with an iPad version due at the end of October, and an Android version two weeks after that.
Peter Molyneux's Godus scheduled to land on Mac on September 13
If you've not heard of Godus, the upcoming deity simulator by heralded developer Peter Molyneux, you need only glance at the game's ultra successful Kickstarter to see how popular it already is. The title is scheduled to arrive on Mac and Windows through the Steam Early Access program on September 13. The game lets you play as a god who must manage a civilization and defend against attacks and other threats. When Molyneux's iOS app Curiosity -- a "game" of sorts that had users chipping away at a giant block with only a single person winning the right to view what was inside the core -- finally concluded, it was revealed that the winner would become the über-God in Godus for one year. This player can cause huge shifts in the game world that impact all other players, and that individual will also receive revenue from sales once it is released. An iOS version of Godus is also planned, though no details on a firm release window have been offered at this time. [via Joystiq]
