NASA - Rumors of Curiosity Major New Finding Wrong

"Press Release - Update Set In San Francisco About Curiosity Mars Rover" by Veronica McGregor, Jet Propulsion Laboratory 11/29/2012

The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 3, in San Francisco at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover's full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds -- carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.

The Mars Science Laboratory Project and its Curiosity rover are less than four months into a two-year prime mission to investigate whether conditions in Mars' Gale Crater may have been favorable for microbial life. Curiosity is exceeding all expectations for a new mission with all of the instruments and measurement systems performing well. This is spectacular for such a complex system, and one that is operated so far away on Mars by people here on planet Earth. The mission already has found an ancient riverbed on the Red Planet, and there is every expectation for remarkable discoveries still to come.

MARS - Curiosity's Amazing Photos and Voice From Mars

"Mars rover sends amazing photos, 1st human voice from red planet" by Mike Wall, Fox News 8/28/2012

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has beamed home the first human voice ever sent from another planet, as well as some spectacular new images of its Martian environs.

The 1-ton Curiosity rover broadcast a pre-loaded greeting from NASA administrator Charlie Bolden, who congratulated the mission team for getting the huge robot to Mars safely. While the significance of the audio accomplishment is largely symbolic, NASA officials hope it presages a more substantial human presence on the Red Planet down the road.

"With this, we have another small step that's being taken in extending the human presence beyond Earth, and actually bringing that experience of exploring the planets back a little closer to all of us," said Curiosity program executive Dave Lavery, invoking the famous line late astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered from the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969.

"As Curiosity continues her mission, we hope the words of the administrator will be an inspiration to someone who's alive today, who will become the first to stand upon the surface of the planet Mars," Lavery told reporters Monday. "Like the great Neil Armstrong, they'll be able to speak aloud — in first person at that point — of the next giant leap in human exploration."

The mission team also unveiled today a stunning 360-degree panorama of Curiosity's Gale Crater landing site, showing in crisp detail some of the landforms scientists want the six-wheeled robot to explore. [Video: Curiosity's Martian Panorama]

Searching for habitable environments

Curiosity touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5, tasked with determining whether the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life.

For the next two years, Curiosity is slated to explore Gale and the crater's 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) central peak, the mysterious Mount Sharp. The $2.5 billion rover is outfitted with 10 different science instruments to aid its quest, including a rock-zapping laser and gear that can identify organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.

Curiosity's ultimate destination is the base of Mount Sharp, where Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water. These interesting deposits lie about 6 miles (10 km) from the rover's landing site as the crow flies.

The new 360-degree panorama, which is composed of 140 images snapped by Curiosity on Aug. 8 and Aug. 18, shows Mount Sharp's many-layered foothills, as well as its upper reaches stretching into a brown-tinged Martian sky. [Gallery: Photos from Curiosity's 4th Week on Mars]

The mosaic has Curiosity's scientists licking their chops.

"I think when those of us on the science team looked at this image for the first time, you get the feeling, 'That's what I'm talking about,'" said Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, a geologist at Caltech in Pasadena. "That is why we picked this landing site."

While researchers are most excited about the potential discoveries that await them on Mount Sharp's flanks, the scenic beauty captured in the panorama got their hearts racing, too, Grotzinger said.

The terrain "looks like it was something that comes out of a John Ford movie," he said.

A year away?

Though Curiosity took its first short test drive last week, it still hasn't strayed far from its landing site, which the mission team dubbed "Bradbury Landing" in honor of the late scifi author Ray Bradbury.

The rover should be ready to head out in a few days, Grotzinger said — but Curiosity won't be going straight to Mount Sharp. Rather, the first stop is Glenelg, a site 1,300 feet (400 meters) away where three different types of terrain come together in one place.

It'll likely take the rover a month or two to reach Glenelg, where it will spend another large chunk of time performing science operations. Curiosity could be ready to turn its wheels toward Mount Sharp by the end of the year, Grotzinger has said.

But it'll take Curiosity a while to reach the mountain. The rover will probably cover a maximum of about 330 feet (100 m) per day after it's fully checked out, researchers have said. And it may stop along the way to Mount Sharp to study interesting landforms.

"It'll probably take us a year to get there," Grotzinger said.

Also today, Curiosity scientists announced that tests of the rover's onboard chemistry laboratory, SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars), are going well. SAM can detect organics in Martian soil, and it will sniff the Red Planet's atmosphere for methane, which may be a sign of life as organisms here on Earth are known to generate the gas.

The SAM tests are part of an ongoing checkout of Curiosity and its science instruments, which has proceeded very smoothly so far.

"Curiosity, as you've gathered by now, is a very complicated beast with lots of parts, and the project's being very systematic about testing things out," said SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"We think of ourselves a little bit as the nose of Curiosity, and we're getting ready to start sniffing," Mahaffy added.

AMERICA - We're Back on Mars!

PERSONAL NOTE: I watched the last 20min of the landing (includes the 11min video below), live, from JPL on my laptop.

"Rover Curiosity lands safely: 'Wheels down on Mars'" by Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times 8/6/2012

Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, stuck its extraordinary landing Sunday night in triumphant and flawless fashion, and is poised to begin its pioneering, two-year hunt for the building blocks of life — signs that Earth's creatures may not be not alone in the universe.

NASA's $2.5-billion mission involved the work of more than 5,000 people from 37 states, some of whom had labored for 10 years to hear the two words that Al Chen, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, said inside mission control at 10:32 p.m.: “Touchdown confirmed.”

Chen reported that Curiosity was in a “nice flat place,” and as icing on the cake, the spacecraft sent home thumbnail photographs of itself. Officials had said earlier in the day that photographs were possible but unlikely. Curiosity responded by immediately delivering a series of images, one showing one of its wheels resting comfortably on the floor of an ancient crater.

Inside mission control, engineers who had been chewing the insides of their cheeks and bouncing their legs nervously leapt to their feet, embracing, high-fiving and, in some cases, weeping with joy. “Yes!” one engineer cried, pumping his fist. “We did it again!” another shouted.

The striking success of the mission turned some steeped in hard science back into dreamers. JPL Director Charles Elachi said he walked outside mission control about an hour and a half before landing and stared up at Mars. “You are going to have a visitor,” Elachi said he whispered. “And the planet smiled,” Elachi said. “That's when I knew.”

Curiosity is expected to revolutionize deep-space science, not only searching for indications that Mars is or was habitable, but paving the way for the next critical steps in exploration — soil-sample returns, sending astronauts to Mars, even, perhaps, colonization.

“It's an extraordinary step forward in planetary exploration,” said John Holdren, President Obama's science and technology advisor. “Nobody has ever done anything like this.” Anyone questioning the United States' commitment to science and ambition should consider the “one-ton, automobile-sized piece of American ingenuity” that is now on Mars, Holdren said.

It had been a long and tense day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the mission for NASA.

As scientists' ambitions for Curiosity had grown in recent years, so had their spacecraft. This would not be a replay of the smaller rovers of the past -- which had, themselves, delivered extraordinary science and pretty firm evidence that rivers once coursed across the surface of Mars.

This would be a full-fledged geochemistry lab, on wheels, able to vaporize rocks, “taste” air samples and ingest dirt, then send the results of experiments home from 154 million miles away.

Curiosity's size required engineers to devise an entirely new landing sequence. Thousands of carefully calibrated and experimental devices -- which could never be vetted on Earth because Mars' atmosphere is so different -- had to work in precise lockstep for the spacecraft to survive.

The landing sequence, which NASA had dubbed “seven minutes of terror,” required the largest supersonic parachute ever deployed in space, a perilous-looking “sky crane” and 76 pyrotechnic explosions. If any one of those “pyros” had not occurred, “we die,” said Adam Steltzner, a leader of the landing team. Officials had spent much of the day Sunday speculating about how Curiosity might fail, and what the consequences might be for America's space program.

“I was really on pins and needles,” said NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. He called it a “huge day for the American people.”

“Everybody in the morning should be sticking their chest out saying: ‘That's my rover on Mars,'” Bolden said.

The primary mission is expected to last for at least one Martian year, or 687 Earth days.

Previous NASA missions have found evidence that Mars, now a cold and dry planet, had a warmer, watery past, so much so that scientists think of it as Earth's space cousin. Every environment on Earth that contains liquid water also sustains life. Curiosity will search for the other building blocks of life, particularly carbon-carrying organic molecules.

“Mars looks like it has been habitable,” said Michael Meyer, a leader of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. “But you need to go and look.... And Curiosity is the rover that is able to do that.”

Other than the decision to send the robot to Mars in the first place, the choice of a landing site was probably the most important issue scientists faced.

For five years, space scientists made impassioned arguments for their favored site.

Last summer, from a pool of 60 candidates, NASA and JPL decided to send Curiosity to Gale Crater, an ancient geological feature just south of the equator, caused when a meteor slammed into Mars 3 billion years ago.

Gale Crater won out largely because of an enormous mountain in its center. Dubbed Mt. Sharp in honor of noted Caltech geologist Robert Phillip Sharp, the mountain is three miles high. That's taller than any mountain in the “lower 48” of the United States, and taller than some portions of the rim of the crater that encircles the mound.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite that launched in 2005, has found that the mountain's slopes contain distinct layers -- clay at the bottom, an apparent remnant of Mars's watery past, a layer of sulfates on top of that, and layers of sand and dust toward the top.

Similar to the way the walls of the Grand Canyon offer a layered view of the evolution of North America, space scientists believe Mt. Sharp's slopes contain a preserved record of Mars's past.

Caltech's John Grotzinger, Curiosity's principal investigator, said the rover “will have started the era of a whole new dimension of space exploration.” That dimension, he said, is one of “deep time.”

Rather than getting a snapshot of one point in time on Mars, the mountain will allow Curiosity to build an understanding of “hundreds of millions to even billions of years,” Grotzinger said this weekend as JPL ramped up for landing.

Curiosity will climb the lower portion of the mountain to investigate the makeup of the layers of soil.

NASA-JPL Lab Launch Center (11:31)

JPL Curiosity News Conference (56:40)