curiosity

It's been a little while since we've heard from the Mars Curiosity rover, but over the past few weeks, it's been very busy examining what could be evidence of mud cracks in a slab of Martian rock. That slab of rock - dubbed Old Soaker by NASA scientists - features many raised ridges that could have been created by drying mud billions of years ago. If that's the case, then we'll have even more evidence for a wetter environment in the planet's past.

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Earlier this month, NASA's Curiosity rover, which is currently prowling the surface of our neighbor Mars, went into safe mode for an unknown reason. Though NASA scientists weren't exactly sure why Curiosity went into safe mode, it has been announced that the rover resumed full functionality as of July 9. Since then, scientists have been working to find the reason for the mishap, and now they're saying they have a good idea of what happened.

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Over the last year, NASA has discovered numerous evidence that liquid water exists on Mars. With signs the red planet once had lakes, and frozen water found on mountains, NASA now wants to try collecting a sample, and plans to use the Curiosity rover to do it. The robot is already located near Mars's Gale Crater, and it will travel to inspect a pair of gullies on the side of Mount Sharp.

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Mars is a desolate and lonely place that also happens to be quite beautiful. During the time, that NASA's massive Curiosity rover has been cruising the landscape of the Red Planet NASA has offered up some very cool images for us to check out. One of my favorite is the Curiosity Selfie at the top of this story. More recently, NASA has offered up a 360-degree video that Curiosity shot.

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The news and discoveries related to water on Mars just keep flowing! Shortly after NASA's exploration of the red planet recently confirmed that water in liquid form still exists, new data has suggested that there once may have been enough to support life. NASA's Curiosity rover has been studying the Gale crater, discovering evidence that it was once the site of a lake-like body of water, and for a long period as well.

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This week video editor Luke Fitch took it upon himself to create a video from NASA's Curiosity mission landing photos on Mars. Fitch did a healthy amount of editing to fill out the frames between the frames, and even then the video is about 3x faster than the actual landing - but it's as close as we're going to get for the time being. This video is less than a minute long and will give you a fantastic sense of what it's like to land on the planet Mars from a first-person perspective.

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NASA’s Curiosity rover is still puttering around the Red Planet, drilling small holes and taking pictures and giving its human operators better insight into humanity’s future home away from home. Over the weekend, the space agency published a composite image of the upper region of Mount Sharp, Curiosity’s future stomping grounds, taken by the rover on September 9. In it we get a look at a beautiful landscape not so different from our own.

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A bit tired of flying around Pluto in the outer ridges of our solar system? Then perhaps it's time to zoom back into our own nearby neighborhood, because the Curiosity has something interesting to share. The Martian rover has just finished taking its latest album of the red planet, which NASA has stitched up together into one glorious panorama. Lo and behold, the images revealed some petrified sand dunes not unlike those found here on Earth, which could hold more clues to Mars' ancient past.

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NASA's Curiosity rover keeps snapping pictures of things that look like other things, and some people insist it's all proof of a grand conspiracy and/or aliens. We haven't actually stumbled upon an alien yet (at least as far as we've been told), but we have come across rocks that look like rats, crabs, a woman, a pyramid, pieces of old houses, and whatever other images your brain forms from the rumble. And now, a spoon...but not just any ol' spoon.

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This week one of NASA's scientists working on the Mars rover project was asked to comment on multiple sightings of odd objects on the planet's surface. Everything from Martian crabs to Martian rats and back to the newest: a lizard! Today we'll go through a number of photos of supposed alien life on Mars along with Ashwin Vasavada's responses to each of them. We'll begin with the especially terrifying prospect of the miniature ghostly striding woman found several weeks ago.

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NASA's Mars mission rover Curiosity sends back images captured near a drilled rock called "Buckskin". Not to be outdone by today's "The Martian" trailer release, NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover has sent the image you're about to see as a composite of several photos captured in short sequence. The image you're seeing here is part of a larger panorama also available in the gallery below. This image was captured with Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) earlier this month and attained by NASA this week.

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NASA's Curiosity rover has sparked an unexpected argument over methane on Mars, as operators attempt to figure out whether the gas is local or imported. The existence of methane on the red planet could be a strong indicator either of biological life or even just lingering geological activity, hence scientists' collective interest in whether it's present or not. However, while Curiosity seems to have spotted the gas, there are some who think it itself is responsible for it.

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