Posted on by Ken Kremer

Mars Trek begins for Curiosity

Image Caption: Martian Soil caked on Curiosity’s right middle and rear wheels after Sol 22 Drive. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mars Trek has begun for NASA’s Curiosity rover. The mega rover has departed from her touchdown vicinity at “Bradbury Landing” and set off on a multi-week eastwards traverse to her first science target which the team has dubbed “Glenelg”

Glenelg lies about a quarter mile (400 meters) away and the car-sized rover drove about 52 feet (16 meters) on Tuesday, Aug 28 or Sol 22 of the mission.

The science team selected Glenelg as the first target for detailed investigation because it sits at the intersection of three types of geologic terrain, affording the researchers the chance to get a much more comprehensive look at the diversity of geology inside the Gale Crater landing site.

The Sol 22 drive was the third overall for Curiosity and the farthest so far. At this new location, some 33 feet ( 10 m) from Bradbury Landing , the Mastcam color camera is collecting high resolution images to create a 3 D map of features off in the distance that will aid the rover drivers in planning a safe traverse route.

“This drive really begins our journey toward the first major driving destination, Glenelg, and it’s nice to see some Martian soil on our wheels,” said mission manager Arthur Amador of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The drive went beautifully, just as our rover planners designed it.”

In about a week, the science team plans to deploy the 7 ft (2.1 meter) long robotic arm and test the science instruments in the turret positioned at the terminus of the arm.

“We are on our way, though Glenelg is still many weeks away,” said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We plan to stop for just a day at the location we just reached, but in the next week or so we will make a longer stop.”

Perhaps in about a year or so, Curiosity will reach the base of Mount Sharp, her ultimate destination, and begin climbing up the side of the 3.6 mile (5.5 km) high mound in search of hydrated minerals that will shed light on the duration of Mars watery past.

The goal is to determine if Mars ever had habitats capable of supporting microbial life in the past or present during the 2 year long primary mission phase. Curiosity is equipped with a sophisticated array of 10 state of the art science instruments far beyond any prior rover.

Ken Kremer

Image Caption: Curiosity Points to her ultimate drive destination – Mount Sharp – with unstowed robotic arm on Aug. 20. This navigation camera (Navcam) mosaic was assembled from images on multiple Sols. Curiosity will search for hydrated minerals using the robotic arm and a neutron detector on the body. Image stitching and processing by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. Featured at APOD on 27 Aug 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

Posted on by Jason Major

Curiosity Sends Back Incredible Hi-Res Views of Mt. Sharp

Wow — what a view! This image, released today, is a high-resolution shot of the Curiosity rover’s ultimate goal: the stratified flanks of Gale Crater’s 3.4-mile (5.5-km) high central peak, Mount Sharp. The image was taken with Curiosity’s 100mm telephoto Mastcam as a calibration test… if views like this are what we can expect from the MSL mission, all I can say is (and I’ve said it before) GO CURIOSITY!


“This is an area on Mount Sharp where Curiosity will go,” said Mastcam principal investigator Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems. “Those layers are our ultimate objective. The dark dune field is between us and those layers. In front of the dark sand you see redder sand, with a different composition suggested by its different color. The rocks in the foreground show diversity — some rounded, some angular, with different histories. This is a very rich geological site to look at and eventually to drive through.”

Read more: Take a Trip to Explore Gale Crater

The gravel-strewn region in the foreground is Curiosity’s immediate landing area. Then the ground dips into a low depression called a swale, then rises up again to the edge of a crater that’s rimmed with larger rocks. Quite a bit beyond that (about 2.2 miles/3.7 km away) are fields of dunes composed of darker material, and then the hummocky base of Mount Sharp itself begins to rise up about 3.4 miles (5.5 km) in the distance.

The topmost ridges of Mount Sharp visible above are actually 10 miles (16.2 km) away.

A crop of the full-size image shows a large rock at the foot of a knoll that’s about the same size as Curiosity (which is this big compared to a person and previous rovers):

The rocky mound just behind the boulder in that image is itself about 1,000 feet (300 meters) across and 300 feet (100 meters) high. Gale Crater isn’t a place for a faint-hearted rover!

The colors have been modified from the original image in order to help better discern landforms and differences in surface materials. Here, the images look more like what we’d see under natural Earthly lighting.

Curiosity already is returning more data from the Martian surface than have all of NASA’s earlier rovers combined.

“We have an international network of telecommunications relay orbiters bringing data back from Curiosity,” said JPL’s Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. “Curiosity is boosting its data return by using a new capability for adjusting its transmission rate.”

See more images from Curiosity here, and keep up to date on the mission at the MSL website here.

“The knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater will tell us much about the possibility of life on Mars as well as the past and future possibilities for our own planet. Curiosity will bring benefits to Earth and inspire a new generation of scientists and explorers, as it prepares the way for a human mission in the not too distant future.”

– NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a message transmitted to the Curiosity rover and then back to Earth, August 27, 2012

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Today’s APOD: Curiosity on Mars

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) features a mosaic put together in part by Universe Today’s Ken Kremer, along with his imaging partner Marco Di Lorenzo, using images sent back from the Curiosity rover. It shows Curiosity’s landing site, Bradbury Landing, with its ultimate destination, Aeolis Mons/Mount Sharp off in the distance. It’s a beautiful and crisp image, which show parts of the rover itself — including the extended robotic arm — and its shadow on Mars. As the APOD editors Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell say, “If life ever existed on Mars it might well have been here in Gale crater, with the Curiosity rover being humanity’s current best chance to find what remains.”

Congrats to Ken and Marco for being featured on APOD!

Posted on by John Williams

Take a Trip to Explore Gale Crater

Mount Sharp Compared to Three Big Mountains on Earth

Images from the Curiosity rover on Mars are truly spectacular but a large mosaic from the THEMIS camera aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter gives a grand perspective of our new foothold on Mars. Take some time to rove and explore Gale Crater.

The viewer, created using a web-imaging technology from Zoomify, is set to move between points of interest, such as Mars Science Laboratory’s landing site in Aeolis Palus, Glenelg, and Aeolis Mons/Mount Sharp itself. The layered sediments flanking Mount Sharp make it the primary target for Curiosity’s two-year mission. Take control at anytime by clicking on the image. This will stop the automatic roving and leave you in control to explore the terrain of Gale Crater. Use your mouse or the toolbar controls to pan and zoom around the image. You can also use the dropdown in the upper right to take you directly to certain points of interest in the image. Over time, we will add to this interactive feature as more geological points of interest are identified.

THEMIS stands for Thermal Emission Imaging System which is a multiband visible and infrared camera aboard Odyssey. The comprehensive mosaic is pieced together from 205 individual scenes, most taken recently but some dating to 2002 shortly after Odyssey entered Mars orbit in 2001. These images were taken before MSL landed on Mars. Even so, as large as the SUV-sized rover is, it would be too small to see in these images. The smallest details in this image are 18 meters or 60 feet across.

This illustration shows the size of Aoelis Mons (Mount Sharp) in comparison to three large mountains on Earth. The elevation of Mount Sharp is given in kilometers above the floor of Gale Crater. The heights of the Earth mountains are given in kilometers above sea level. Image credit: Tanya Harrison, NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Gale Crater is 154 kilometers (96 miles) wide. Near the center rises Aeolis Mons, a 5 km (3 mile) high mound of layered sediments, informally dubbed Mount Sharp, after planetary geologist Robert Sharp who died in 2004. Scientists for a time referred to the conical mountain as “The Mound.” The mountain, which would stand among the highest on Earth, cannot be seen from Earth and was unknown before planetary probes visited the Red Planet.

“The reason we decided to assemble such a large, comprehensive mosaic of Gale Crater was to give ourselves a better sense of the context around the landing site, said Jonathon Hill, a Mars research at Arizona State University who assembled the mosaic, a press release. “This will help us to better understand what Curiosity sees and measures as it roves the surface.”

Gale Crater zoom tour created by John Williams (TerraZoom) using Zoomify.

About the author: John Williams is owner of TerraZoom, a Colorado-based web development shop specializing in web mapping and online image zooms. He also writes the award-winning blog, StarryCritters, an interactive site devoted to looking at images from NASA’s Great Observatories and other sources in a different way. A former contributing editor for Final Frontier, his work has appeared in the Planetary Society Blog, Air & Space Smithsonian, Astronomy, Earth, MX Developer’s Journal, The Kansas City Star and many other newspapers and magazines.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Curiosity’s Descent Video in Amazing, Incredible HD Quality

It keeps getting better! This is a full-resolution version of the NASA Curiosity rover descent to Mars, taken by the MARDI descent imager. This video, put together by Daniel Luke Fitch, uses all but a dozen of the full resolution 1600×1200 frames (some haven’t been uploaded from the rover yet). The result is a mind-blowing, HD view of Curiosity’s view as it landed — and it also shows the best views yet of the heat shield impact. Wow!

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Watch Curiosity’s First Movements

Click to animate: this gif image shows the movement of the rear right wheel of NASA’s Curiosity as rover drivers turned the wheels in place at the landing site on Mars. Image credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech

She turned her right rear wheel in and turned her right rear wheel out in a sort of Hokey-Pokey-like action in preparation for actually moving inside Gale Crater. Yesterday, the Curiosity rover’s first movements was this “wiggle” of each of the four corner wheels for the first time. Curiosity Mission Manager Michael Watkins said this was a test of the steering actuators on the wheels, and was critical preparation for Curiosity’s first drive on Mars.

Late last night, the rover team sent commands for doing the first drive, and we’ll likely have information on whether that first drive was successful, as JPL has a news conference planned for 17:00 UTC, 1 pm EDT on Wednesday.

Below is a video animation of the rover’s first arm movements, as well:

Other news from the press conference yesterday is that all the instruments are working well on the rover so far, except for one of the instruments on the weather station.

One of the two sets of Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) wind sensors is not providing data. “One possibility is that pebbles lofted during the landing hit the delicate circuit boards on one of the two REMS booms,” said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We will have to be more clever about using the remaining wind sensor to get wind speed and direction.”

The rover’s weather station, build by researchers in Spain, checks air temperature, ground temperature, air pressure, wind and other variables every hour at the landing site in Gale Crater. On a typical Martian day, or “sol,” based on measurements so far in the two-week old mission, air temperatures swing from minus 2 to minus 75 Celsius (28 degrees to minus 103 degrees Fahrenheit). Ground temperatures change even more between afternoon and pre-dawn morning, from 3 to minus 91 Celsius (37 degrees to minus 132 degrees Fahrenheit ).

“We will learn about changes from day to day and season to season,” said Javier Gómez-Elvira of the Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain, principal investigator for REMS.

The team predicts that within a week or so, daily Mars weather reports from Curiosity will become available at this website: http://cab.inta-csic.es/rems/marsweather.html or bit.ly/RzQe6p.

Another instrument provided by Russia is checking for water bound into minerals in the top one meter (three feet) of soil beneath the rover. It employs a technology that is used in oil prospecting on Earth, but had never before been sent to another planet.

“Curiosity has begun shooting neutrons into the ground,” said Igor Mitrofanov of Space Research Institute, Moscow, principal investigator for this instrument, called the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons, or DAN. “We measure the amount of hydrogen in the soil by observing how the neutrons are scattered, and hydrogen on Mars is an indicator of water.”

The most likely hydrogen to be found in shallow ground of Gale Crater, near the Martian equator, is in hydrated minerals. These are minerals with water molecules, or related ions, bound into the crystalline structure of rocks. They can tenaciously retain water from a wetter past after all free water has gone.

With plans for Curiosity to begin roving, there will soon be new places for all the instruments to measure. The rover team explained the first real drive today will be a very simple execution: forward about 3 meters, then a turn in place of 90 degrees to the right, then a 2-meter drive backwards. Estimates are the rover will end up about 3 meters from its current position and be facing south instead of east.

Emily Lakdawalla has a nice 4-view animation of the rover’s wheel wiggle, showing three wheels and how the shadow of the rover itself moved.

Posted on by Jason Major

Take a Look Through Curiosity’s ChemCam

This (adjusted) image was taken by ChemCam’s Remote Micro-Imager on Sol 15 (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL)

While Curiosity has been getting a good look around its landing spot on Mars, taking in the sights and sending back some impressive views of distant hills and Gale Crater’s enormous central peak, it’s also been peering very closely at some tiny targets just meters away — with its head-mounted, laser-powered and much-touted ChemCam.

The images above and below were acquired by ChemCam’s Remote Micro-Imager on August 21, the 15th “Sol” of the mission. A full-sized image accessed from the public MSL mission site, it’s been brightened quite a bit to show the details of the target rocks.

Mounted to Curiosity’s “head”, just above its Mastcam camera “eyes”, ChemCam combines a powerful laser with a telescope and spectrometer that can analyze the light emitted by zapped materials, thereby determining with unprecedented precision what Mars’ rocks are really made of.

So even though the rover hasn’t actually roved anywhere yet, it’s still performing valuable scientific investigations of Mars — without moving a single wheel. (UPDATE: actually, Curiosity has begun to do some roving — here are some images of its first wheel tracks!)

Read: Curiosity Blasts First Mars Rock with Powerful Laser Zapper

Because ChemCam uses a laser, Curiosity can examine many targets — up to a dozen — within a small time period without having to drive right up to them. Even the dustiest rocks won’t pose a problem for ChemCam – one or two zaps with its laser will be enough to vaporize any loose surface material.

In addition to searching for the building blocks of life hidden inside rocks, ChemCam will also serve a precautionary role for future explorers by helping identify the potential toxicity of Mars’ soil and dust. When astronauts one day land on Mars, they are going to get dusty. It’s important to know if Mars’ dust contains anything dangerous like lead, arsenic (and who knows what else!)

See the latest images from the MSL mission — including more ChemCam pictures — here.

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL. Edited by J. Major.

Posted on by John Williams

Want To Live On Mars Time? There’s An App For That

Screenview from Mars Clock, available from the Apple Store, that displays Mars time.

You’ve listened to all of JPL’s Curiosity telecons, you can recite the nail-biting sequence of events during MSL’s “Seven Minutes of Terror,” and you’ve devoured thousands of pixels of image data beamed back to Earth. But are you ready to live on Mars time? With a couple of well-timed apps from Google Play and Apple’s app store, you can.

MarsClock, available for Android devices at Google play is a free app written by Scott Maxwell, rover driver for Curiosity. The app, which has been downloaded between 1,000 and 5,000 times, lets you see times for all three of NASA’s Mars Rovers, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The app allows the user to set single alarms or alarms that repeat every sol. A sol is a full Martian day which is about 24 hours, 39 minutes in Earth time.

Perhaps you shun Android devices for your Apple device whether it’s an iPhone, iPad or iPod. Never fear, you too can be everyone’s favorite Martian living on Mars time. Mars Clock, by SunlightAndTime, is a 99-cent app that displays Mars time and a host of other Mars time goodies. Features include local mean solar time for the rover, coordinated Mars time, sunrise and sunset times for the Curiosity landing site (I think this might be the coolest feature), current season, a countdown to landing feature (which is counting up since MSL landed on Mars on August 5th), current Earth time, a distance calculator between the Earth and Mars and radio communications delay estimate.

While it might be hard to add 40 minutes to your day to live as a Martian or as the JPL team that operates the Curiosity rover, these apps sure do make it more fun.

Posted on by Ken Kremer

Curiosity Takes Aim at Martian Destination – Mount Sharp

Image Caption: Curiosity Points to Mount Sharp. Curiosity unstowed the robotic arm on Aug. 20 and aimed it directly at her Martian drive destination – Mount Sharp. This mosaic of the robotic arm was assembled from navigation camera images from Sols 2, 12 and 14 and shows 18,000 foot high Mount Sharp in the background and the shadow of the martian robot’s head at center. Curiosity will search for hydrated minerals using the robotic arm and a neutron detector on the body. Image stitching and processing by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

Curiosity flexed her mighty robotic arm for the first time on Monday (Aug. 20) and aimed the hand-like tool turret squarely at Mount Sharp, her ultimate driving destination.

If you want to see exactly where Curiosity is headed and why she was sent to Gale Crater, just take a look at the new mosaic assembled by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo.

Curiosity is pointing with her robotic arm right at Mount Sharp, the huge 18,000 foot tall (5.5 kilometer) mysterious mound that covers the center of the 96 mile (154 km) wide crater. Our mosaic was prominently featured on the front page of NBC News and in a new article by Alan Boyle – here

The layered sediments in Mount Sharp could unveil the geologic history of Mars stretching back billions of years and reveal why the planet transitioned from an ancient, wet period of flowing liquid water on the surface to the dry, desiccated era of today.

As Curiosity unstowed and raised the 7 foot long (2.1 m) arm and reached towards Mount Sharp, the mast mounted navigation cameras on her head snapped a series of black and white images that included the shadow of NASA’s newest Martian robot. The 6 wheeled, car-sized rover made a harrowing pinpoint touchdown barely 2 weeks ago.

The arm is critical to the success of the mission because it will be used to maneuver a sophisticated turret, mounted at the arms terminus and laden with scientific instruments. It weighs a hefty 66 pounds (30 kg) and is about 2 feet in diameter. The turret includes a high resolution focusable color camera, a drill, an X-Ray spectrometer, a scoop and mechanisms for sieving and portioning samples of powdered rock and soil.

“We continue to hit home runs. We unstowed the robotic arm and took a look at the tools on the end of the arm,” said Curiosity Mission Manager Michael Watkins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at a news briefing on Tuesday, Aug. 21. “It’s kind of a Swiss army knife there where we have a lot of instruments. We wanted to make sure all of that was working by doing these first motor checks. All of that went successfully.”

Watkins said the team was thrilled to finally see images of the arm deployed on Mars after seeing thousands of engineering test images.

“We have looked at images thousands of times in our test environment and I always see the walls of the test lab there.Now to see the arm out there deployed with Mars out there in the background is just a great feeling.”

The next step is more tests to confirm the arms utility and movements and calibrate the instruments . “We will fully check out the arm, drill and processing unit,” said Louise Jandura of JPL, sample system chief engineer for Curiosity, at the briefing. “The arm has already performed all these motions on Earth, but in a different gravity condition and that gravity does matter. Our turret at the end of the arm weighs as much as a small child and the differences in gravity change the amount of sag at the end of the arm. We want to be able to fine tune these end-point positions. So it will take some time to put the arm through all its paces.”

What’s more is that Curiosity is wiggling her wheels and is all set to make her first martian test drive on Wednesday.

“Late tonight, we plan to send Curiosity the commands for doing our first drive tomorrow,” said Watkins. “Curiosity will drive about 10 feet, turn right and then back up so her rear wheels will wind up about where her front wheels are now. The cameras will photograph the tracks and evaluate the performance of Curiosity driving ability and the softness of the surface soil.”

The 1 ton mega robot is also equipped with the DAN (Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons) instrument provided by Russia to check for water bound into minerals as hydrates in the top three feet (one meter) of soil beneath the rover.

“Curiosity has begun shooting neutrons into the ground,” said Igor Mitrofanov of Space Research Institute, Moscow, principal investigator for DAN. “We measure the amount of hydrogen in the soil by observing how the neutrons are scattered, and hydrogen on Mars is an indicator of water.”

The mission goal is to ascertain whether the Red Planet was ever capable of supporting microbial life, past or present and to search for the signs of life in the form of organic molecules during the 2 year primary mission phase.

Ken Kremer

Image Caption: Panoramic Vista of Mount Sharp (at right) and Gale Crater from NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars. Curiosity will eventually climb 3.4 mile high Mount Sharp in search of hydrated minerals. This colorized panoramic mosaic shows was assembled from new navigation camera (Navcam) images snapped by Curiosity on Sol 2 and Sol 12 and colorized based on Mastcam imagery from Curiosity. Image stitching and processing by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. See black and white version below. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo Lorenzo – www.kenkremer.com

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Video: What Would Mars Look Like to an Astronaut in Orbit?

Image of Mars from Mars Express. Credit: ESA

Future human Mars mission preview! The team from Mars Express put this great video together which shows what Mars looks like from above, during an elliptical orbit. They created it using 600 individual still images captured by the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC), and it shows the view from a visiting spacecraft’s slow descent from high above the planet, then speeds up during closest approach, and then slows down again as the orbital distance increases.

A Mars Express VMC camera image of Mars from May, 2012. Credit: ESA

Visible are giant Martian volcanoes, a quick glimpse of the ice-covered South Pole, and Mars terminator as day turns to night. Then quickly daylight returns, and then the visitor sees the North Pole, followed by the long climb away from the planet over the equator. Finally, at the end of the movie — look closely! –the disk of Phobos can be seen crossing over Mars.

The VMC is being used almost like a Mars webcam! It consists of a small CMOS-based optical camera, which can be fitted with an on-pixel RGB color filter for color images. So, it is basically an ordinary camera, but it is in an extraordinary place! It originally provided simple, low-tech images of Beagle lander separation — a mission which, unfortunately failed and crashed. But the VMC has been resurrected to provide views of the Red Planet. It’s not a scientific instrument, but it does provide fantastic views of Mars – including crescent views of the planet not obtainable from Earth.

The images used here were taken during Mars Express’ 8,194th orbit of Mars on May 27, 2010 between 02:00 and 09:00 UTC (04:00-11:00 CEST).

More info on VMC.