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NASA to broadcast Curiosity's 1st anniversary celebration on August 6th 10:45 ET
It's hard to believe August 5th marks Curiosity's first year on Mars -- it seems like only yesterday that we were on tenterhooks during the rover's precarious landing on the red planet. Within that time, it hasn't only fulfilled its initial mission of finding evidence of extraterrestrial water, but it has also discovered traces of carbon-based materials and captured an astounding number of Mars close-ups. To celebrate everything Curiosity's done thus far, NASA JPL will broadcast its first anniversary event via Ustream on August 6th, 10:45AM EDT. The program kicks off with a series of pre-recorded interviews with the mission's team, but a live stream with NASA officials and the crew aboard the ISS will follow. Folks itching to pick their brains can ask them questions in advance via Curiosity's Twitter or Google+ accounts, or during the event by using the #askNASA hashtag. Even if you're not a fan of the rover, you might still want to tune in -- NASA will also be chatting about its preparations for the first human mission to Mars and to an asteroid.
NASA makes billion-pixel Mars panorama out of photos captured by Curiosity
Sure, they're mostly just pictures of sand and rocks, but we still have to thank the Curiosity rover for beaming back images of landscapes we'll never walk on. To give you a panoramic view of a Mars area called "Rocknest" with Mount Sharp visible on the horizon, NASA stitched together almost 900 exposure shots into a single 1.3-billion-pixel image. The photos were taken over the course of more than a month (from October 5th to November 16th last year) at different times of the day, so you can observe variations in illumination and thickness of dust in the atmosphere throughout the panorama. Head over to the source to access the whole interactive mosaic replete with pan and zoom controls, and if you're lucky, you might even see a rock the rover's laser zapped in the past. [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS]
Peter Molyneux talks next-gen consoles, communal gaming and Oculus Rift
Fabled (and Fable) game designer Peter Molyneux has long been a visionary in the gaming world, and his most recent effort, the Kickstarted title known as Godus, has piqued our Curiosity. However, as a veteran of the console world, we jumped at the chance to get his take on next-gen along with an update on his own projects. Surprisingly, Molyneux wasn't particularly enthused with the new generation of consoles. Part of the problem, as he sees it, is that consoles are still too focused on the living room, while our digital lives are much more mobile -- which is why, in part, Godus is being built for laptops and phones first. "I wanted them [the consoles] to shock and surprise me" with new ways to integrate with mobile devices, he says, but the current mobile features feel like a "bolt-on" rather than an integral part of gameplay. Aside from all the next-gen talk, we got an update on the man who removed Curiosity's final block (he's just beginning to enjoy the fruits of godhood), and got his thoughts on Oculus Rift (spoiler: he's a fan). While words describing an interview are good, an actual interview is better -- this one awaits you after the break.
Mars pebbles prove that rivers altered the planet's surface
Scientists already had an inkling that water helped form the landscape on Mars, but they're now ready to confirm that claim. In a report written for Science, researchers state that the smooth, rounded shape of the Red Planet's pebbles and the way they overlap is identical to the gravel formation found in Earth's rivers. They appear to be too large to be blown by wind, and their varied shades indicate they were transported from various locations -- telltale signs of a former stream. "For decades, we have speculated and hypothesized that the surface of Mars was carved by water, but this is the first time where you can see the remnants of stream flow with what are absolutely tell-tale signs," said Rebecca Williams to the BBC. This isn't the first time we've heard of water on Mars, but the idea of a Martian river does make us wonder if Marvin had a favorite fishing hole.
Curiosity: A worthwhile shame
I played Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube. I played it for a few hours over the course of its six-month lifespan. I feel a small amount of shame in confessing this, shame that I don't feel about anything else I've ever played – not Hooters Road Trip, not Dragon Power, nor any of the other terrible things I've subjected myself to. At least those things were games. Curiosity is a repetitive chore with a thin layer of "game" over it. It's gamification, applied to nothing. But despite making fun of it relentlessly – and, on a couple of occasions, even simultaneously while making fun of it – I tapped cubes. My ironic detachment failed, and I couldn't help but buy into the hype on some level, at least enough to participate. I admit that even though I knew it was a dumb game predicated on a promise from someone notorious for hyperbolic and unfulfilled promises, the novelty of the "life-changing prize" intrigued me. And so I joined thousands of strangers in helping some guy scratch off the world's most annoying lottery ticket.
Curiosity rover discovers dangerous levels of radiation during Mars transit
While we've learned that radiation levels on Mars are safe for humans, actually getting there in the first place remains a problem. Recent results from Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) reveal that exposure even while safely ensconced inside a protected spacecraft is dangerously high. Explorers would be bombarded with 466 milliSieverts of high-energy galactic cosmic rays and solar particles during the 253-day transit and the same coming back, with total levels that could exceed NASA's career radiation limit for astronauts. "In terms of accumulated dose, it's like getting a whole-body CT scan once every five or six days," said Cary Zeitlin, a principal scientist from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) who's the lead author of the findings. A manned Mars voyage isn't completely out of the question, but it does mean better shielding is necessary before such a trip -- much less a future colony -- becomes a reality.
Curiosity's Godus prize is temporary
Scotland's Bryan Henderson may be the god of all gods in Godus, but for all his godliness his godly status isn't eternal. As revealed by 22 Cans' Peter Molyneux to Rock Paper Shotgun, Henderson, who won the Godus prize by discovering what was inside the Curosity cube, will dictate the god game's rules for something "approaching a year" after its release, as well as earn a portion of its income. After that time, developer 22 Cans will reveal how he can be usurped, and someone will indeed usurp him. Also, the length of Henderson's reign may depend on Kickstarter backers' impressions of the god game and how all this madness comes together throughout alpha and beta testing. "It didn't seem right to me that Bryan would be god of gods for all time," Molyneux told Rock Paper Shotgun. "It seems right to me that he has a period of time to be god of gods, and that can't just be a few days. It needs to be substantial. And in that time, many things could happen. And of course, the amount of physical money he gets depends on how successful the game is."
Curiosity ends; Winner will become Godus' god
We've been following the saga of 22Cans' Curiosity ever since it started last year, and after speeding up the project just recently, Peter Molyneux has announced via Twitter today that it's now done. The last cube has been tapped by a winner in Scotland named Bryan Henderson, and the prize is that Henderson will become the actual god of Godus, which is Molyneux's next game in the works. As you can hear in the winner's video, Henderson will get to help decide the rules of the game going forward, and there's a little monetary compensation as well: He'll get a cut of the proceeds whenever someone spends money in Godus. Thus ends the saga, then, of what's in the cube. Or maybe not -- the app is still live in the App Store, and the last cube currently is showing a Twitter search of the hashtag #whatsinthecube. 22Cans has finished its experiment, and while the cube didn't exactly become a mainstream phenomenon as Molyneux may have hoped, the project, we heard, was profitable, and considering that someone did reach the end, I'd call it a success. We'll have to wait and see what Godus looks like when finished, and then if Molyneux has any other social, experimental ideas like this in the works going forward.
Molyneux's Curiosity cube concludes [Update: Winner's video added]
22 Cans' Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube ended today, revealing a live stream of tweets using the hashtag #whatsinsidethecube to the public. Peter Molyneux noted via Twitter that the last person to chip away at the cube is located in the UK, and was the sole person to see what's actually at the middle of the cube, which is seemingly a link to a video and more than just a collection of tweets. "The winner should have a message on their cube now!!! Asking them to email a special email address, hope they share," Molyneux tweeted. Curiosity launched in November 2012 on the App Store, and had players around the globe chipping away at pixel-like squares on the multi-layered cube to collectively get to its core. We will update as we learn what was really inside the cube, providing the winner decides to share it with the world. Update: The video given to the winner of Curiosity has been shared by Molyneux and 22 Cans, and can be seen above. Update 2: Spoiler alert! The prize for the winner of Curiosity, as outlined in the video by Molyneux himself, is that they "will be the god of all people that are playing Godus. You will intrinsically decide the rules that the game is played by." Godus is a god game in development by 22 Cans, which received over $852,000 in Kickstarter funding for the project in late December 2012. Molyneux added that the winner, a certain Bryan Henderson of Edinburgh, Scotland, will also "share in the success of the product," in that "every time people spend money on Godus, [he] will get a small piece of that pie." Molyneux said he'll reveal details on how the prize will be carried out at a later date.
Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube is now open, contents still a mystery (update: prize revealed!)
After seven months of cooperative tapping, Peter Molyneux's Curiosity experiment is finally over: the cube is open. As Molyneux's studio, 22Cans, teased the game's last layer over Twitter, players descended upon it, chipping away the last million cubelets in a matter of minutes. "We have a winner," the game's creator wrote on the social network. "They should get a message now." 22Cans is currently trying to validate the player who tapped away the final block. After the final block disappeared, so did the cube, presumably to be opened privately by the winner. So, what was inside the box? We may never know -- but if you just happened to win, fill us in, would you? Update: The winner asked Molyneux to share the winner video with the community. Their prize? Godhood, according to 22Cans. The winner will be featured as a deity in the company's next game, Goddus, and will able to "decide on the rules that the game is played by." The winner will get a share of the revenue generated by the title. Check out the full video for yourself after the break.
Watch the Curiosity rover explore Mars in one minute (video)
It hasn't even been a year from the time NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars, yet it already boasts a number of accomplishments. All the while, Opportunity's successor has been sending images back to Earth documenting its numerous great deeds, and a fan of the rover's work has compiled many of the them into the video you can find after the break. So, now you can get a glimpse of Curiosity capturing awe-inspiring shots of Mount Sharp, unearthing evidence of liquid water, determining the alien soil's chemical composition, and discovering conditions that could've allowed microbes to thrive on the red planet, all in the span of a minute. Hit play to check out what Curiosity's been up to from its first through its 281st Sol -- or Martian day -- as well as to see the extraterrestrial lands our grandchildren might occupy in the future.
22Cans speeds up the Curiosity cube
Peter Molyneux's 22Cans studio put out Curiosity on iOS last year, as a sort of a social game-slash-experiment. The idea was that hundreds of thousands of people would be able to download the app, and then use it chip away (by tapping) on a virtual cube, unearthing layer after layer of virtual cubes, with only one person getting the chance to eventually tap on the center. Originally, the project was scheduled to end sometime next year, but that's become too long for 22Cans: The company has decided to update the app down to the last 50 layers. "I think six months is a long time for this to go on," Molyneux has told Wired. "We're on the cusp of it being forgotten about." That's certainly true -- the iOS market moves quickly, and Curiosity never really did catch players' attention the way 22Cans hoped it would. But Molyneux believes that even though the app may have fallen down many players' priority lists, the project is worth following through on. "It is life-changing in any measurable way," he says about the reward hidden at the center of the cube. "I'm telling you, you want this." Interesting. Curiosity has also been playing with monetization, offering in-app purchases to both remove cubes from the game more quickly, and even offering to put them back on for a certain price. But for all of its experimenting, Molyneux says the game has only made "a few tens of thousands" of British pounds. 22Cans is also expected to announce another new title -- the company is currently working on a followup to Populous called Godus, which it ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for, and boosting Curiosity's interest will help them promote the next title after that. So if interest picks up again, it may not be long at all before we finally see these last 50 layers chipped away. And then, we'll all get to finally find out just "what's in the cube."
Curiosity's end may coincide with new Xbox reveal
Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube is now officially down to its last 50 layers. Even Peter Molyneux is impatient for 22Cans' bizarre iOS experiment to end, telling Polygon: "Enough's enough, for crying out loud." The game, which is about tapping to remove dots from a cube to reveal the "life-changing" secret within, features a countdown timer running toward the projected end of the experiment, when one person will clear the final layer. "I thought six months was about the length of time that Curiosity should go on before it closed, and this is almost exactly the six month anniversary of the end of Curiosity," Molyneux told GameSpot. "Bizarrely, as part of that controversy, is that the end of the cube – the last layer of the cube – might well be, I mean probably if you look at our analysis of probability, the same day that the next Xbox is announced. Which would be a bizarre twist of fate." The next Xbox is due to be revealed May 21. Or a bizarre twist of Pete? Regarding the coincidence, he told GameSpot, "There's an interesting opportunity, possibly, for me to ... well, I can't say any more than that. There may be some words from me around that time. I'm not saying any more." Confirmed: The next Xbox will come in a box made of billions of tiny cubes. Along with today's news, 22Cans released the above video, which features visual proof that people like Curiosity at least enough to scrawl dirty words into the cube.
Curiosity rover finds conditions on Mars that could have supported living microbes
"A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," says lead Mars Exploration Program scientist Michael Meyer, quoted in a NASA press release today. "From what we know now, the answer is yes." He's referring to the latest Curiosity findings announced at a press conference today, which NASA says "shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes." That evidence specifically comes from powder the Curiosity rover drilled out of a rock near an ancient stream bed in Mars' Gale Crater, which contained sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon -- "some of the key chemical ingredients for life," as NASA puts it. Mars Science Laboratory scientist John Grotzinger further explains that "we have characterized a very ancient, but strangely new 'gray Mars' where conditions once were favorable for life," adding, "Curiosity is on a mission of discovery and exploration, and as a team we feel there are many more exciting discoveries ahead of us in the months and years to come." You can find the full announcement after the break.
Curiosity rover leaves safe mode, remains in Martian limbo
The Curiosity rover has been in an especially precarious position since late last week, when a memory glitch forced it into a safe mode while NASA prepared a backup and diagnosed the trouble. We're glad to report that the worst is over. Scientists have confirmed that the rover left safe mode later on Saturday and started using its high-gain antenna for communication a day later. However, it's not quite out of the woods yet -- if Mars had woods, that is. The backup is still taking on the information it needs to assume full responsibility, and NASA wants to evaluate the suitability of the one-time primary computer as the new backup. Nonetheless, all the early indicators point to Martian exploration going back on track within days.
Curiosity rover to stay in 'safe mode' for days while NASA tackles glitches
NASA's Curiosity rover has mostly had smooth sailing since it touched down on Mars last year. Unfortunately, it's in a more precarious position as of this past Thursday. After noticing corrupted memory files on the robot's primary computer, overseers have kicked Curiosity into a "safe mode" with a backup computer while they determine what's wrong and deliver any viable fixes. Don't think of this like you would the Safe Mode on a Windows PC, though. While the backup can serve as a replacement for the main computer, project manager Richard Cook warns Space.com that it will likely take "several days" to supply enough information that the failsafe can take over. NASA will switch back to the main computer if and when it's ready; if it is, the agency hopes to harden the code against future flaws. Curiosity will effectively stay on ice in the meantime... and not the variety it might want to find.
Curiosity rover drills into Martian rock, looks for more evidence of water
NASA scientists won't have to wait until InSight's 2016 drilling mission to see what lies beneath the surface of Mars -- Curiosity is already on the case. After developing a taste for Martian soil late last year, the intrepid rover has started exploring the red planet's bedrock, drilling a 0.63 inch (1.6 cm) wide hole 2.5 inches (6.4 cm) deep into Mars' surface. Curiosity will spend the next several days analyzing the resulting powder in hopes of finding evidence of a once-wet planet. The shallow hole marks the first drilling operation ever carried out on Mars, and getting there wasn't easy. "Building a tool to interact forcefully with unpredictable rocks on Mars required an ambitious development and testing program," explained Louise Jandura, the chief engineer of the rover's sample system. "To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth." The Rover tested its drill by creating a shallower hole earlier this month, though samples will only be used from the second, deeper cavity. Check out the source link for more images of the operation, including an animated GIF of the drill in action.
Curiosity spends holidays in Yellowknife Bay, immortalized on special Foursquare badge
While many of us were opening presents and having our fill of mulled cider, NASA's trusty Curiosity rover was busy at work capturing panoramic views of Yellowknife Bay, a shallow area of unusual terrain on the Red planet. Jokingly dubbed "Grandma's house" by the crew, the rover spent over 11 Martian days there so that handlers could take some time off for the holidays. When they get back, the space vehicle will hopefully have provided enough data to pinpoint a potential drilling area so it can drill, collect and analyze rock samples using onboard tools -- a feat never-before attempted on Mars. The Curiosity rover has, however, checked in on Foursquare on Mars, which is a feat no one else is likely to attempt. In continued collaboration with the social media platform, NASA is now providing a Curiosity Explorer badge to anyone who checks in to a NASA visitor center or a venue categorized as a science museum or planetarium. Badge recipients will get this message: "Get out your rock-vaporizing laser! You've explored your scientific curiosities just like NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. Stay curious and keep exploring. You never know what you'll find." No idea if you'll get a free "scoop" of space ice cream or a hand in the next Mars mission along with it, but we're behind anything that boosts the public's interest in space.
22cans' lead game designer talks about Curiosity and moving forward to Godus
Gary Leach is the lead game engineer at 22cans, which you probably know by now is game designer Peter Molyneux's experimental startup aiming to put together 22 different game experiences before actually releasing a full title. So far, 22cans has favored the iOS and Mac platforms with their releases: Curiosity is their first experiment, and it launched on the App Store to both great, well, curiosity, and even some complaints about server outages and bugs. But the game is better now, says Leach. "It's going really well," he told TUAW today. "In some ways we're kicking ourselves for planning it so badly, and we had some big decisions to make on whether we're going to take the thing down or try and poke through this." In the end, however, 22cans decided to update the game -- they released version 2.0 this week, and Leach says "the community feel is still just amazing." At this point, Leach says the game's popularity has essentially leveled out. People come and go, and he says a lot of users will come back occasionally just to see how the game is doing. But there are about as many people leaving the game as arriving, so while the numbers are obviously down from launch, they're steady at the moment. Aside from the technical bugs, Leach says one of the hardest things about the game has been balancing its casual and hardcore audiences. In-app purchased items in the game are sold for hundreds of thousands or even millions of in-app coins, and Leach says that "the range of motivations" to earn that currency "is enormous. These beginner types will come on and earn a few thousand coins and think they've done well. But the hardcore audience, 100,000 coins for them is no work at all. So how do you balance that?" Leach says that's the main crux of the conversations during Curiosity's development, and that "a lot of it came down to who's going to be on middle marker and how much they can earn." Users continue to tap away at the big cube in Curiosity, but 22cans and Leach have moved on to the next experiment, a "re-imagining" of Peter Molyneux's original god game, Populous, called Godus. The team has headed to Kickstarter for funding on this project, and Leach says that's because while Curiosity was the kind of experiment that was meant to say "hey world, we're here," Godus is more involved, and it's "the kind of title that potentially publishers may not have gone for." Not much is known about the game, but it will allow players to warp the geography of a virtual world, as well as oversee virtual citizens living and fighting in various battles together. Currently, 22cans is hard at work on a prototype of the game, and Leach says the prototype is mostly being developed on Mac and iOS (the studio has also announced that the final title will be available on Apple's platforms as well). But the current prototype, according to Leach, is only code "that we are using for our own internal evaluation process. None of this code is going to go into the final product. This is code that's going to get binned." So Godus as a finished project hasn't even started yet. As a developer, Leach says he's very excited to work on it, however. He started "kind of midway through the Curiosity project," and says he "was spending the first few weeks trying to catch up to what we were doing." But Godus, on the other hand, is more his speed. "When we first started talking about Godus, that's when I thought this was the product I was meant to make," Leach says. "I'm doing something here that is going to run beautifully on mobile devices and is going to look as good as a desktop game." Godus' Kickstarter is up and running now, and with about seven days left, 22cans has picked up just under three-fourths of the money it's asking for. But Leach's enthusiasm is still very strong. "There's so many reasons to be excited."
Curiosity version 2 is 'what the experiment always should have been'
Peter Molyneux's experimental game company 22 Cans is already hard at work on its next title, Godus, which it's trying to fund through Kickstarter. But the company's also still updating its first title, Curiosity, and version 2.0 has arrived on the App Store today. This is a significant update, according to the company, calling it "what the experiment always should have been." That means this update offers more than server reliability and squashed bugs. Now you can now look at the cube from afar and watch, in purportedly real time, other people hacking away at its surface from far away or close up. There are also new items available via in-app purchase, including the badger and the golden badger, which will randomly bound around the cube and knock off squares as they go. Honestly, the "game" itself isn't all that different. Items are still priced super high for what they actually give you, and players aren't all that much closer to hacking away to the center of the cube. However, the core experience is still free, and it is kind of interesting to log in and see other people chipping away along with you. We haven't found out just "what's inside the cube" yet, but if you want to see how the game is going, it's worth logging in before all of the chipping away is done.
