NASA's Mars exploring Curiosity rover has begun drilling on the Martian surface, with a test run identifying a good spot to take new rock samples. Curiosity had been hunting down a promising location over the weekend, using a variety of tools to dust down and otherwise prepare the location NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has dubbed "Windjana" after a Western Australian gorge.
Sony is working with NASA to turn Project Morpheus, its new virtual reality headset for PlayStation 4, into both a science and an entertainment tool. The collaboration, revealed at GDC 2014, will take the feeling of "presence" to new levels, Sony's Dr Richard Marks of the R&D team working on Project Morpheus, said, kicking off with content beamed back from Mars.
NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back some impressive photos from its time on Mars - selfies, moon timelapses, and billion-pixel panoramas - but its latest helps put the plucky rover's journey in context like nothing before. A new image shared by the US space agency shows Earth in the Martian night sky, a pinprick of light traveling 99 million miles from home.
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 the scientists on this project have said they're confident that there's a possibility of life at this point without literally saying they've found that life outright.
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 orbiting satellites and sensors suggested that methane might be present on the surface of Mars.
We've seen a lot of neat photos from Mars thanks to NASA's latest Curiosity rover that's currently putzing its way around the surface of the red planet. The latest imagery that it has sent back is a rather simple, but neat timelapse video of one of Mars' moons rising into the Martian sky.
NASA's Curiosity rover has sent more than a few pictures of the Red Planet back to its Earth-bound audience, a great deal of which have been made freely available for the public to view on the space agency's website. The latest image to be made public, however, stands out from the rest due to its sheer size: a huge 1.3 billion pixels. Such a resolution was achieved by stitching together hundreds of frames.
It's a great time for Lego: there's going to be a movie based on the building bricks, and the company just announced its latest set. As a part of Lego's Cuusoo project, fans are able to send in designs and ideas for future Lego sets, and the Mars Curiosity rover won this round, beating out the USC Sandcrawler from Star Wars and the Portal-themed Lego set.
We've seen NASA's Mars Curiosity rover bore into Martian rock with a small drill multiple times, but the robot has just taken things to the next level: lasers. Specifically, the rover got to bore a small hole into Martian rock by blasting it with a laser repeatedly, causing a hole a few millimeters in diameter, which you can see after the jump.
It's been a few months since NASA's Curiosity rover drilled into Mars' rocky surface for the first time, but the little rover that could has bored into the red planet for the second time, collecting a healthy amount of Mars dirt along the way to be analyzed by the rover in the next few days.
March was an eventful month for NASA's Mars Curiosity rover, which experienced a variety of issues and delays, some due to problems with the rover itself and others due to conditions outside of anyone's control. Those issues have been resolved, but now starting today a communication moratorium has gone into effect, and Curiosity will be on its own, perhaps taking the most exotic vacation ever, until May 1.
NASA expects to have the Curiosity rover back up and exploring Mars "in a few days" time the space agency has announced, with the fix for the unexpected downtime "very straightforward" according to the mission lead. A software error was blamed for the rover being put into automatic fault-protection mode - freezing all activity - when a file was artificially inflated in size and thus failed a software check.
