It’s a date! Millionaire Dennis Tito to send couple on manned Mars mission on Jan. 5, 2018

An artist’s illustration of the Inspiration Mars Foundation’s spacecraft for a 2018 mission to Mars by a two-person crew. The private Mars mission would be a flyby trip around the Red Planet. (Inspiration Mars Foundation)

A maverick millionaire obsessed with space travel vowed to send a manned mission to Mars, even announcing the date the rocket carrying one man and one woman would set off for the Red Planet: Jan. 5, 2018.

On that date, a preferably married couple yet to be chosen will enter a tiny space capsule for the longest date in history — rocketing into the heavens and the record books, promised Dennis Tito, the brains behind The Inspiration Mars Foundation and the American businessman who paid about $20 million to visit the International Space Station in 2001 aboard a Russian spacecraft.

 

WHO WILL THE COUPLE BE?

“This is humanity’s first flight out to Mars, and humanity should be represented by both genders,” Dennis Tito said.

“We hope that we can find a married couple. When you’re out that far and the Earth is a tiny blue pinpoint, you’re going to need someone you can hug. What better solution to the psychological problems you’re going to encounter with that isolation?” Read more

 

After a trip of about 140 million miles, the brave couple will be the first humans ever to peer out a window at Mars — but not set foot there.

Their spacecraft will not stop on the surface of the planet, instead orbiting around the Red Planet at a distance of 100 miles out before using the planet’s gravity to slingshot back to the Earth, he said.

“This will be a Lewis and Clark mission to Mars,” explained Taber MacCallum, CEO for space development company Paragon and one of the scientists working on the Inspiration Mars program.

Why now? Why 2018?
If we don’t seize the moment, we may miss the opportunity to explore Mars, the group claims. That’s because the Jan. 2018 deadline is a hard one: According to a 1996 paper that inspired the private project, the planets only come together perfectly for a mission like this once every 15 years. And while the next window is just five short years away, the follow-up won’t be until 2031.

“The planets realign every 15 years, and who wants to wait for 2031?” Tito said. “By that time, we might have company.”

Tito himself won’t be flying on this mission; rather, it will be an unnamed, middle-aged crew consisting of a man and a woman.

“I will not be one of the crew members. And if I were 30 years younger, I still would not be,” Tito said. Instead mechanically trained (and likely much younger) astronauts will pilot the craft on its mission.

 

‘This will be a Lewis and Clark mission to Mars.’

- Taber MacCallum chief technology officer for space development company Paragon

 

The trip is relatively straightforward, according to the various presenters at the event, akin to a low-earth orbit trip in complexity. But due to the distances involved, there are obvious, glaring risks to the 501-day mission.

“It’s 1.4 years, no chance for abort. If something goes wrong, there’s no chance of coming back … and we’re going to re-enter at record speeds, 14.2 kilometers per second,” explained MacCallum. The trip is conceptually feasible, he said, but the technical details to make it happen have yet to be completed. There are a wealth of spacecraft being developed at present, giving them a wealth of options, however.

He called it a demonstration that could lead to further exploration of Mars.

“We’re trying to be a stepping stone toward that” he said. But “a program of record is really needed to make that happen.”

How will astronauts make it to Mars?
Technology aside, will people be able to survive such a mission however, trapped in a tiny capsule and breathing the same air day in and day out, month after month, all the way to Mars and back?

Absolutely, explained Jonathan Clark , chief medical officer for Inspiration Mars — and the medical officer for Felix Baumgartner’s recent dramatic plunge from space.

“This is going to be the Apollo 8 moment for the next generation,” he said. “It’s about inspiring our children, particularly my son. To me this really strikes a deep personal note.”

To keep the crew alive in deep space, where we have limited experience, he would rely on past experience working in micro gravity. Radiation may be an issue, he said. Clark said individual genomic analysis of the astronauts would allow them to tailor protection to the mission. And other advanced studies and research would be necessary to protect the astronauts, whom he said would be “middle-aged.”

“Do we have our work cut out for us? Yes, absolutely,” he said. Beyond merely sustaining the crew, the team will be challenged by the psychological stress of such a mission.

“It’s a really long road trip, you’re jammed into an RV that goes the equivalent of 32,000 times around the Earth…and they’ll have about 3,000 pounds of dehydrated food that they’ll get to rehydrate with the same water they drank two days ago,” explained Jane Poynter, also of Paragon and also a member of the project.

A system that provides all of the basic needs of the crew already exists, she said, based on the system in place on the International Space Station, though it is simpler and more robust.

It’s important that we have a man and woman on the mission, she said, because they reflect humanity. And having both genders reflect should serve further to inspire the next generation to look to the stars — and open their science text books.

“Getting a tweet from a female astronaut, from Mars, and looking down at what she’s seeing and describe it for us? And then turning around and looking back at Earth and describing that tiny dot that she’s seeing? These two astronauts will take all of us along on the ride,” Poynter said.

The cost of the mission is still not determined, Tito explained, although reports say it could cost as much as $1 billion. But it will clearly be a money-loser for the former NASA scientist, who founded the investment firm Wilshire Associates that eventually made him a millionaire.

“This is not a commercial mission,” he said. “Let me guarantee, I will come out a lot poorer as a result of this mission. But my grandchildren will come out a lot wealthier because of the inspiration they will get from this mission.” But the mission will be cheap, he stressed.

“This is really chump change compared to what we’ve heard before.”

The team already has a signed space act agreement with NASA, and says they will launch the craft from Moffitt Field at NASA’s Ames facility in California. The space agency on Wednesday applauded the goals of Inspiration Mars.

“This type of private sector effort is further evidence of the timeliness and wisdom of the Obama Administration’s overall space policy,” said NASA spokesman David Steitz, in a statement posted on SpaceRef.com.

“It’s a testament to the audacity of America’s commercial aerospace industry and the adventurous spirit of America’s citizen-explorers.”

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Still going: Long-lived NASA rover Opportunity commencing tenth year of exploration on Mars

MARS –  Opportunity, NASA’s other Mars rover, has tooled around the red planet for so long it’s easy to forget it’s still alive.

The late-afternoon shadow cast by the Mars rover Opportunity at Endeavour Crater. The six-wheel rover landed on Mars in January 2004 and is still going strong. (AP Photo/NASA)

Some 5,000 miles away from the limelight surrounding Curiosity’s every move, Opportunity this week quietly embarks on its tenth year of exploration — a sweet milestone since it was only tasked to work for three months.

“Opportunity is still going. Go figure,” said mission deputy principal investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis.

True, it’s not as snazzy as Curiosity, the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever designed. It awed the world with its landing near the Martian equator five months ago.

After so many years crater-hopping, Opportunity is showing its age: It has an arthritic joint in its robotic arm and it drives mostly backward due to a balky front wheel — more annoyances than show-stoppers.

For the past several months, it has been parked on a clay-rich hill along the western rim of Endeavour Crater that’s unlike any scenery it encountered before. It plans to wrap up at its current spot in the next several months and then drive south where the terrain looks even riper for discoveries.

Long before Curiosity became everybody’s favorite rover, Opportunity was the darling.

The six-wheel, solar-powered rover parachuted to Eagle Crater in Mars’ southern hemisphere on Jan. 24, 2004, weeks after its twin Spirit landed on the opposite side of the planet.

‘Opportunity is still going. Go figure.’

- Mission deputy principal investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University

During the first three months, there were frequent updates about the twin rovers’ antics. The world, it seemed, followed every trail, every rock touched and even kept up with Spirit’s health scare that it eventually recovered from.

Opportunity immediately lived up to its name, touching down in an ancient lakebed brimming with minerals that formed in the presence of water, a key ingredient for life. After grinding into rocks and sifting through dirt, Opportunity made one of the enduring finds on Mars: Signs abound of an ancient environment that was warmer and wetter than today’s dusty, cold desert state.

Spirit, on the other hand, landed in a less interesting spot and had to drive some distance to find geologic evidence of past water. After six productive years wheeling around, it fell silent in 2010, forever stuck in Martian sand.

Opportunity went on to poke into four other craters, uncovering even more hints that water existed on Mars long ago.

The rover “is not like a lander staring at the same real estate. We’ve gone to different terrains, explored different geology and answered different questions on Mars,” said project manager John Callas of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs the $984 million project.

What’s still unknown is whether Mars ever had the right environmental conditions to support microscopic organisms — something Curiosity is trying to answer during its two-year mission. Besides water, it’s generally agreed that a power source like the sun and carbon-based compounds are essential for life.

Unlike the flashier Curiosity, armed with the latest tools, Opportunity is not equipped with a carbon detector. Its latest crater destination, which it arrived at last year after an epic three-year journey, contains sections rich in clay deposits. Clays typically form in the presence of water and can be a fine preserver of carbon material. But scientists will never know.

As it enters its tenth year on Mars, Opportunity will continue studying the chemical makeup and pinning down the ages of several interesting rocks at its location for several more months before adding more mileage to the 22 miles it has logged since landing.

As for the hunt for carbon, all eyes are on Curiosity, set to drive later this year to the base of a mountain where rock layers containing clay minerals have been detected.

Callas, the JPL project manager, said Curiosity has a long way to go to catch up with Opportunity, which has nearly a decade head start on the Martian surface.

“Mars is big enough for more than two rovers to explore,” he said.

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Mars Mystery: Has Curiosity Rover Made Big Discovery?

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery “for the history books,” but we’ll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.

Curiosity’s self portrait from Mars

The discovery was made by Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover’s onboard chemistry lab, and it’s capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.

SAM apparently spotted something interesting in a soil sample Curiosity’s huge robotic arm delivered to the instrument recently.

“This data is gonna be one for the history books,” Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told NPR. “It’s looking really good.”

Watch Video:  

http://www.space.com/18436-curiosity-inhales-mars-gets-carbon-dioxide-buzz-video.html

The rover team won’t be ready to announce just what SAM found for several weeks, NPR reported, as scientists want to check and double-check the results. Indeed, Grotzinger confirmed to SPACE.com that the news will come out at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which takes place Dec. 3-7 in San Francisco.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover landed inside Mars’ huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

The car-size robot carries 10 different instruments to aid in its quest, but SAM is the rover’s heart, taking up more than half of its science payload by weight.

In addition to analyzing soil samples, SAM also takes the measure of Red Planet air. Many scientists are keen to see if Curiosity detects any methane, which is produced by many lifeforms here on Earth. A SAM analysis of Curiosity’s first few sniffs found no definitive trace of the gas in the Martian atmosphere, but the rover will keep looking.

Curiosity began driving again Friday (Nov. 16) after spending six weeks testing its soil-scooping gear at a site called “Rocknest.” The rover will soon try out its rock-boring drill for the first time on the Red Planet, scientists have said.

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NASA SECRET DISCOVERY ON MARS: Meteor offers possible clue

Space rock was flung to Earth after asteroid strike

All the boffinry world is alive with speculation as to just what the as yet unnannounced “one for the history books” discovered by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity might be. But a recently-published study may offer a clue.

In the investigation, researchers from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the Carnegie Institution and the Lunar and Planetary Institute compared water concentrations and hydrogen isotopes in crystals within shergottites – two meteorites that came to Earth from Mars as a result of an asteroid strike on the red world. Both were primitive, but one was relatively rich in elements including hydrogen although the other wasn’t.

Did Mars once look like Earth?

“There are competing theories that account for the diverse compositions of Martian meteorites,” Tomohiro Usui, lead author of the paper and a former NASA/LPI postdoctoral fellow, said. “Until this study there was no direct evidence that primitive Martian lavas contained material from the surface of Mars.”

“Usui revealed that the initial hydrogen isotopic composition of Mars was Earth-like, because he designed an experiment that greatly reduced contamination to the meteorite here on Earth,” said coauthor Justin Simon, a JSC cosmochemist.

One meteorite changed little on its way to the Martian surface from the mantle. The concentration of water in the rock was low, suggesting the inside of Mars is parched. The other meteorite had contact with the atmosphere and had ten times more water, suggesting that the surface could have been very wet at one time.

The full study is online at scientific database ScienceDirect.

NASA’s keeping schtum until at least next month on just what the Curiosity rover’s sample analysis unit has discovered to set its boffins in such a tizzy: but solid evidence of a watery surface on Mars in the past – though not as blockbusting as proof of life – would nonetheless be considered significant enough by the space agency that it would only make revelations after careful checks.

It could just be that Usui’s meteorite study will be borne out by Curiosity’s analysis. We’ll have to wait and see.

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Curiosity snaps “arm’s length” self-portrait on Mars

Oct. 31, 2012: NASA’s Curiosity rover captured a set of 55 high-resolution images (left), which were stitched together to create this full-color self-portrait from Mars (right). (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

There you are, the first human to step onto the surface of Mars.

Your astronaut colleagues are still on board the lander, cheering on your historic first interplanetary steps. Of course there are cameras on the lander, and your buddies are filming the whole event from inside their pressurized capsule, but you can’t resist.

To record this moment for posterity, you grab your own camera from your suit pocket, hold it at arm’s length and snap a shot of your head and upper torso in the alien, red landscape.

PHOTOS: Curiosity Flips Powerful Camera’s Dust Cap

Personally, I’m a huge fan of candid arm’s length photography, especially when I’m exploring a new place alone. But for the one-ton Mars rover Curiosity, self portraits are becoming an essential staple of its time on the Martian surface. What’s more, the rover is kitted out with a huge array of wonderfully advanced cameras, one of which – the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) – is mounted perfectly at the end of its 2-meter long robotic arm.

In this intimate scene we can see Curiosity, as if in mid-playtime, in its Mars sandbox — a geologically interesting area called “Rocknest.” In the lower left are the scoop trenches where samples of Mars soil have been excavated and in the upper right, the base of Mt. Sharp (the unofficial name of Aeolis Mons, a 3-mile high mountain in the center of Gale Crater). Wheel tread-marks surround the rover.

ANALYSIS: Curiosity Finds Some Aloha Spirit in Mars Soil

This image is composed of a mosaic of 55 high-resolution photos. Apart from providing a great portrait of our beloved robotic emissary on Mars, these photos provide the MSL team with an invaluable means of keeping track of dust buildup and wheel tread wear. Although Curiosity is still relatively shiny and new, as the years march on, we’ll likely see marked changes in its appearance. If its still-functioning rover cousin Opportunity is anything to go by, Curiosity will be coated in a rusty orange coat in no time at all.

Go to the NASA JPL mission site to download the incredibly detailed high-resolution version

 

Yum! Curiosity rover eats Mars dirt, finds odd bright stuff

Three bite marks left in the Martian ground by the scoop on the robotic arm of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity are visible in this image taken by the rover’s right Navigation Camera during the mission’s 69th Martian day, or sol (Oct. 15, 2012). The (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has swallowed its first tiny bite of Martian soil, after standing down for a spell while scientists checked out some strange bright bits in the dirt.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover ingested the minuscule sample — which contains about as much material as a baby aspirin — on Wednesday (Oct. 17). The soil has been successfully delivered to the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, or CheMin, mission scientists announced today (Oct. 18).

“We are crossing a significant threshold for this mission by using CheMin on its first sample,” Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement.

“This instrument gives us a more definitive mineral-identifying method than ever before used on Mars: X-ray diffraction,” Grotzinger added. “Confidently identifying minerals is important because minerals record the environmental conditions under which they form.” [Video: Curiosity's First Scoopful of Mars Dirt]

Bright stuff on Mars

The sample that found its way into CheMin came from the third scoop of soil Curiosity dug up at a site dubbed “Rocknest.” The first scoop was discarded after being used to scrub out the rover’s sampling system, to help ensure that no Earth-originating residues remained.

Work at Rocknest slowed after Curiosity dug its second scoop on Oct. 12, when researchers noticed oddly bright flecks at the bottom of the hole. The team dumped the scoop out, worried that it might contain debris that had flaked off Curiosity.

They already knew that some tiny rover pieces are littering the Martian ground, after spotting a bright shred of what appears to be plastic on Oct. 7. Team members have since identified five or six other such bits, which may have fallen off Curiosity’s sky-crane descent stage during landing on Aug. 5.

“We went super-paranoid,” Grotzinger told reporters today. The team determined that “if this stuff is man-made, we better make sure that we’re not taking any of it in.”

So Curiosity moved to a slightly different location, and then took lots of pictures to make sure that the surface was pristine before making scoop number three. If any bright flecks are indeed present in the sample, they’re naturally occurring, the mission team reasons, since any rover pieces would be restricted to the surface.

All that being said, Curiosity scientists now believe the bright soil flecks are indeed indigenous to Mars. They could be minerals that are part of the soil-forming process, Grotzinger said, or reflective surfaces created by the cleaving of ordinary dirt.

The team aims to fire its mineral-identifying laser, which is part of Curiosity’s ChemCam instrument, at some of the pieces in the next few days to get a better idea of what they actually are.

Mars under the microscope

Curiosity carries 10 instruments to help it determine whether its Gale Crater landing site has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. But CheMin and another instrument on the 1-ton rover’s body, known as Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), are the rover’s core scientific gear.

SAM is a chemistry laboratory that can identify organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. The instrument has been sniffing the Martian air already, but it has yet to analyze its first soil sample. That should change in a week or so, Grotzinger said, after further cleaning of the rover’s sampling system.

Curiosity continues to be in good health, researchers said. After the six-wheeled robot finishes testing out its scooping and sampling systems at Rocknest, mission scientists will begin searching for a spot to break out the rover’s rock-boring drill. The first drill activity will be a complicated affair that could take month or so all up, Grotzinger said.

Curiosity is currently checking out deposits near a site called “Glenelg,” where three interesting types of Martian terrain come together. But its ultimate destination is the base of Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain rising from Gale Crater’s center.

Mount Sharp’s foothills show signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water. Curiosity could be ready to start rolling toward the mountain’s interesting deposits — which lie about 6 miles (10 km) away — in a couple of months.

“I would hope we’d be on our way by the end of the year,” Grotzinger said.
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GO ROVER !! NASA Rover Finds Old Streambed on Martian Surface

NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named “Hottah” after Hottah Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence — images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels — is the first of its kind.

Scientists are studying the images of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. The sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream’s flow.

“From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”

The finding site lies between the north rim of Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. Earlier imaging of the region from Mars orbit allows for additional interpretation of the gravel-bearing conglomerate. The imagery shows an alluvial fan of material washed down from the rim, streaked by many apparent channels, sitting uphill of the new finds.

The rounded shape of some stones in the conglomerate indicates long-distance transport from above the rim, where a channel named Peace Vallis feeds into the alluvial fan. The abundance of channels in the fan between the rim and conglomerate suggests flows continued or repeated over a long time, not just once or for a few years.

The discovery comes from examining two outcrops, called “Hottah” and “Link,” with the telephoto capability of Curiosity’s mast camera during the first 40 days after landing. Those observations followed up on earlier hints from another outcrop, which was exposed by thruster exhaust as Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Project’s rover, touched down.

“Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it’s really a tilted block of an ancient streambed,” said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The gravels in conglomerates at both outcrops range in size from a grain of sand to a golf ball. Some are angular, but many are rounded.

“The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn’t be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow,” said Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.

The science team may use Curiosity to learn the elemental composition of the material, which holds the conglomerate together, revealing more characteristics of the wet environment that formed these deposits. The stones in the conglomerate provide a sampling from above the crater rim, so the team may also examine several of them to learn about broader regional geology.

The slope of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater remains the rover’s main destination. Clay and sulfate minerals detected there from orbit can be good preservers of carbon-based organic chemicals that are potential ingredients for life.

“A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment,” said Grotzinger. “It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We’re still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”

During the two-year prime mission of the Mars Science Laboratory, researchers will use Curiosity’s 10 instruments to investigate whether areas in Gale Crater have ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, built Curiosity and manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

For more about Curiosity, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

You can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

Guy Webster / D.C. Agle 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

 

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Mars Curiosity Descent – Ultra HD 30fps Smooth-Motion

Mars rover sends amazing photos, 1st human voice from red planet

This photo from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity shows the layered geologic history of the base of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-high mountain rising from the center of Gale Crater. Image taken on Aug. 23, 2012. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

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.”
‘[Curiosity is] the next giant leap in human exploration.’
- NASA administrator Charlie Bolden

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.

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.

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 sci-fi 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.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/28/mars-rover-sends-human-voice-from-red-planet/?intcmp=features#ixzz24qqsqQ1O

NASA’s Mars rover zaps rock with laser

PASADENA, Calif. –  NASA’s Curiosity rover has zapped its first Martian rock, aiming its laser for the sake of science.

During the target practice on Sunday. Curiosity fired 30 pulses at a nearby rock over a 10-second window, burning a small hole.

Since landing in Gale Crater two weeks ago, the six-wheel rover has been checking out its instruments including the laser. During its two-year mission, Curiosity was expected to point the laser at various rocks as it drives toward Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high mountain rising from the crater floor.

Its goal is to determine whether the Martian environment was habitable.

In several days, flight controllers will command Curiosity to move its wheels side-to-side and take its first short drive.

The $2.5 billion mission is the most expensive yet to Mars.
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