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NASA's Curiosity rover has set mountain climbing as its New Year's Resolution, with the intrepid space explorer headed up a Martian peak  for its 2013 challenge. The nine-month trek - punctuated with pitstops for drilling and sample analysis - will see Curiosity clamber up the 3 mile high Mount Sharp at the center of the Gale Crater it landed near, further hunting evidence that the red planet might once have supported microbial life. Before that, however, Curiosity couldn't resist snapping another self-portrait - with the mountain clearly visible in the background. Read The Full Story

NASA's Curiosity rover could destroy its own electronics systems when it begins using its percussive drill to mine Mars rock samples, the space agency has admitted, a known flaw since before the robot explorer even took off from Earth. The late discovery of a prone-to-failure bond in the drilling mechanism forced the Jet Propulsion Team responsible for the rover to implement a potential workaround, after realizing that should the bond break, an electrical short could zap all of Curiosity's computer systems. Read The Full Story

NASA's teased data "for the history books" from the Curiosity Mars rover has all been a huge misunderstanding, the space agency now says, with the reference apparently encompassing the mission as a whole - not a specific finding. Anticipation was built earlier this month when principal investigator John Grotzinger told NPR that "this data is gonna be one for the history books" and that "it's looking really good"; his comments were interpreted as specific to a set of soil sample results Curiosity's onboard labs had just beamed back to Earth, but NASA says it was all a case of confusion. Read The Full Story