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Aug 12, 2012 10:00 AM   The Mars Rover Curiosity may have been able to execute a staggeringly complex descent and stick the landing, but isn't exactly ready for the mission ahead of it, yet. First, it needs a good old fashioned software update. The update, or "brain transplant" as NASA calls it, will take place in steps over the course of several days, just like when you boot up your Windows computer. The goal is to outfit Curiosity with some software that's less about landing and more about getting around on the surface of an alien planet, specifically avoiding obstacles. NASA's Ben Cichy, a chief software engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory mission puts it this way: "We designed the mission from the start to be able to upgrade the software as needed for different phases of the mission. The flight software version Curiosity currently is using was really focused on landing the vehicle. It includes many capabilities we just don't need any more. It ...

Aug 9, 2012 2:48 PM   Curiosity's day 3 on the Gale Crater, Mars. All systems are running as expected. There is no sign of sailors fighting in the dance hall, cavemen or any freaky show, and here's the first natural 360-degree color panorama image to prove it. It's a clear day on Mars. You can see Mount Sharp ahead of the rover, in the distance. That's the mission final destination, at the center of the Galer Crater. It shows some details from the rover itself: These is the end of the robotic arm. It's like a Swiss Army Knife, containing multiple instruments like the APXS (Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer) and MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager). Here's the wheel of the rover. The marks of the sky crane's thrusters are clearly visible here. And here too. Here's the complete panorama—3653 x 755 pixels. Click to expand and see the whole thing: View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line w...

Over at Wired's Underwire blog, Angela Watercutter spoke with Bobak Ferdowsi, NASA's supercool mohawked mission to Mars activity lead, about his newly acquired celeb status. Of whether such sudden internet fame was something he'd expected: No! Funny story, actually at work we sometimes – to make things more lively – we make our own memes about some of the things that are going on with our projects. Like, if we find a good photo of the rover where it looks particularly human or whatever else or sad, we'll make it like "Rover Problems," or we'll put some sort of caption on it. They're probably not as funny to the outside world as they are to us. So it's hilarious to be a meme myself. Of how his colleagues are dealing with it: The other day we were sitting in the operations room and we were down-linking images from the orbiters, and we're getting that data down and somebody was like, "We're getting a new picture, let me process it and p...

Great news keep coming from the red planet. Curiosity has opened her eyes for the first time. She took a good look around her and decided that life is good in Mars—albeit a bit lonely. Updated: New images coming in, including panoramas and high definition images from the descent. The Navigation Cameras—the eyes that will guide her around Mars—have been activated and they are beaming perfect images down to Earth. The left camera may have had a problem at the beginning, because at first the image was all dark and with a weird white artifact. It actually looked as if she had eyelids and was slowly waking up. This didn't happened with the right camera, which was sending perfect images from the moment it was turned on. I can imagine someone at mission control singing Oh You Pretty Things! in his or her head. "Wake up you sleepy head, put on some clothes, shake up your bed..." The first two images sent by the left Navcam—on the left—looked black and showed a weird artifact. T...

A lot of people are wondering why the first color image from the Mars Curiosity Rover looks so murky. Or why the black and white pictures look so low-resolution and out of focus in some areas. Calm yourselves. They will look absolutely amazing soon, perfect and in high-def. There's many good reasons why they look bad now. Today's image—Curiosity's first color snap—was taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), which, though clearly capable of photographing the horizon, is really designed to take close up pictures of martian rocks and soil. MAHLI is part of a Swiss-army-ish gadget arm that has five more instruments. Its color sensor is 1,600 by 1,200 pixels in size—just a 2-megapixel camera. More than enough to take close-ups of the objects that may get drilled by the other gadgets in the arm. Two megapixels is not that bad. In fact, it can capture plenty of detail, as the crop below clearly shows. So why does the image look hazy and murky? Two words: dust cap. All the cam...