Curiosity

Among the Mars rover Curiosity's many gadgets and gizmos is a weather station, and since landing it has been showing some surprising numbers: Temperatures that are as high as 6 degrees Celsius (42.8 degrees Fahrenheit). That's substantially warmer than expected. The temperatures on Mars' surface are dramatically different during the day and during the night, when they drop to a frigid -70 degrees Celsius. That's because Mars has a very thin atmosphere, so heat from the sun escapes after it sets.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced this week that it has canceled its popular annual open house at its La Cañada Flintridge facility because of federal spending cuts. The event, scheduled for June 8 and 9, typically attracts crowds of more than 15,000 each day. "Everyone here is just horribly disappointed," JPL spokeswoman Veronica McGregor said. "This is an event we look forward to each year and we know the public really looks forward to attending it. " JPL has been in the process of reviewing its public outreach efforts amid pressure from NASA to cut costs to cope with federal spending reductions.

On Aug. 5, I was among those who witnessed the rover Curiosity landing on Mars in real time at NASA 's Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The excitement was overwhelming: The one-ton Mars Science Laboratory broke through the Red Planet's atmosphere, slowed its speed from 13,000 mph to almost zero and touched down. One glimpse of those first images from more than 100 million miles away demonstrated America's leadership in innovation. Curiosity - the rover and the concept - is what science is all about: the quest to reveal the unknown.

Before going incommunicado behind the Sun for a month, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover sent Earth evidence that the Red Planet has lost much of its original atmosphere. The findings, announced by Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, bolster the idea that the Martian atmosphere was once much thicker than it is today -- and come less than a month after the rover drilled its first rock and found signs that Mars was once hospitable to life . Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument sniffed the Martian atmosphere and counted up the isotopes of argon in the air. Isotopes are heavier and lighter versions of the same element, and when a planet starts to lose its atmosphere, the lighter isotopes in the upper layers are the first to go. So if scientists see fewer of the lighter isotopes than expected, it might mean that there was once much more air there.

Did Curiosity capture the galactic equivalent of the Zapruder film when it landed on Mars? Seconds after the NASA robot's landing Sunday night, Curiosity managed to squeeze off a handful of fuzzy, black-and-white photographs. One, taken with a device on its rear known as a Hazcam, captured the pebble-strewn ground beneath the rover and one of its wheels - and a blotch, faint but distinctive, on the horizon. The images were relayed by a passing satellite. Two hours later, the satellite passed overhead again.

For all the hopes NASA has pinned on the rover it deposited on Mars last month, one wish has gone unspoken: Please don't find water. Scientists don't believe they will. They chose the cold, dry equatorial landing site in Mars' Gale Crater for its geology, not its prospects for harboring water or ice, which exist elsewhere on the planet. But if by chance the rover Curiosity does find H2O, a controversy that has simmered at NASA for nearly a year will burst into the open. Curiosity's drill bits may be contaminated with Earth microbes.

Curiosity infobox 8/7/11 'Curiosity' Where: Animal Planet; Discovery; TLC When: 8 p.m. Sunday Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children) 'The Creation Question: A Curiosity Conversation' Where: Discovery; TLC When: 9 p.m. Sunday Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Curiosity (did you hear?) landed on Mars. Now come the jokes. On Twitter, we have (among others): @supermario_47: ”Curiosity is on # Mars. Sure went a long way after killing the cat.” Photos: Mars rover mission @SarcasticRover: “One of my wheels makes dinosaur-footprint shaped tread marks… just to mess with the creationists.” “I'm going to take a nap… even though all the science here is super important and… LOL JK, I'M JUST SIFTING DIRT LIKE A BEACH-HOBO!

Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, stuck its extraordinary landing Sunday night without a hitch and is poised to begin its pioneering two-year hunt for the building blocks of life - signs that Earth's creatures may not be alone in the universe. Applause erupted across the campus of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge and engineers inside mission control could be seen hugging and weeping with joy. Al Chen, an engineer on Curiosity's entry, descent and landing team, said the words that space scientists had been waiting on for 10 years: "Touchdown confirmed.

Not content with messing up Earth, apparently we've taken to messing up other planets. The Times' Louis Sagahun reported Monday that the Mars rover Curiosity's “drill bits may be contaminated with Earth microbes. If they are, and if those bits touch water, the organisms could survive.” Seems that Curiosity was initially sterilized, then some folks got cold feet about the rover's ability to drill once it hit the surface of the Red Planet, so they opened the box of drill bits and put one bit into Curiosity's drill.  NASA being NASA, there are rules for handling this sort of thing, including that the “planetary protection officer,” one Catharine Conley, was supposed to be consulted.  But NASA being NASA, she wasn't.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory may be most famous for sending Curiosity to Mars and Voyager  to the edge of the solar system, but some of its coolest technology is being used right here on Earth. For the last month, a manned C-20A aircraft owned by NASA has been flying a powerful imaging radar system built and managed by JPL over the Americas to collect data on glacier activity, map the coastal mangroves in Latin America, study tiny changes in the Earth's surface caused by the movement of magna beneath active volcanoes, help scientists and government agencies figure out how to improve the levees in New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, and look for evidence of a 2,000-year-old lost civilization in the Peruvian desert.  The radar's unweildy name is the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, but it goes by UAVSAR.

Hear that? That's the sound of silence from NASA's Curiosity rover -- and possibly the sound of separation anxiety at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as the intrepid Martian robot takes nearly a month-long break from exploring the Red Planet. Mars has entered a phase known as "solar conjunction," which is when the sun lines up between Earth and the Red Planet, blocking communications with the rover. To avoid any mishaps, the Mars Science Laboratory mission is letting the rover operate solo until about May 1 -- giving it about three and a half weeks of vacation time.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in August 2012, and has been sending back a constant stream of images ever since. Some of these images are dazzling -- wide dusty panoramas with Curiosity's ultimate destination, Mount Sharp, looming in the background. Others are less visually exciting for regular folks, but meaningful for scientists -- like close-up images of a rock whose rounded edges were likely created by the flow of water that suggest the planet was once home to flowing rivers.  In the days just after Curiosity landed, even the most mundane image that the rover sent back was thrilling.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is up and running after a pair of back-to-back computer scares, officials at Jet Propulsion Laboratory said, and should be back to its science tasks in the next two days. The rover has emerged from a weekend of safe-mode after engineers on the mission discovered a relatively minor glitch in the rover's software, according to Mars Science Laboratory project manager Richard Cook -- one essentially corrected by simply deleting a file. "It cost us a couple days," Cook said in an interview.

NASA's Curiosity rover is taking time off after the very first Martian rock it drilled turned out to be a hole-in-one, chock full of evidence that hypothetical microbes could have lived on the Red Planet. In the rock known as John Klein, the Mars Science Laboratory rover found six elements key to life on Earth - hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon - as well as clays indicating an area once rich in water and salts hinting of a benign, low-acidity environment.

NASA's Curiosity rover has drilled a hole-in-one, discovering signs of a past environment once suitable for living microbes -- and the discovery has left some NASA officials breathless. The Mars Science Laboratory mission's early achievement of its stated goal before ever reaching its destination, Gale Crater's 3-mile-high Mt. Sharp, may be inspiring some to even greater Martian ambitions. LIVE DISCUSSION: Join us at 2 p.m. PT "Just sitting in the audience here, I feel giddy.

Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, appears to have landed on Mars to begin its pioneering, two-year hunt for the building blocks of life - signs that Earth's creatures may not be alone in the universe. The craft was scheduled to land at 10:31 p.m. Pacific time in an ancient geological feature known as Gale Crater. The landing site was 154 million miles from home, enough distance that the spacecraft's elaborate landing sequence had to be automated.

The Curiosity rover is within 100 days of landing on Mars, and JPL scientists are jazzed about the upcoming adventures of the biggest rover yet sent to the Red Planet. The Mini Cooper-sized vehicle, ensconced within the Mars Science Laboratory, is speeding toward the Red Planet, rapidly whittling away the 352-million-mile journey. Meanwhile, on Monday, a handful of journalists gathered in the California desert for a confab with Caltech's John Grotzinger, project scientist for Curiosity.

Drilling into the Martian surface in search of signs of ancient life, the Mars Curiosity rover hit the jackpot, NASA said Tuesday. The intrepid geologist on wheels analyzed a powdered sample pulled out of the Red Planet last month and  discovered some of the basic building blocks of life - and signs of a past environment capable of hosting primitive microbes. “We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and is so supportive of life that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” mission lead scientist John Grotzinger, a Caltech geologist, said at a news conference in Washington, D.C. The powdered rock sample the rover pulled out of a rock named John Klein in Yellowknife Bay yielded sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and carbon - among the major players in the biological cycles of Earthly living things.

Hydrogen. Carbon. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Sulfur. Phosphorus. These elements account for more than 96% of the stuff life on Earth is made from - and all six have been found in a rock sample on Mars. NASA scientists said Tuesday that the Curiosity rover discovered these basic building blocks of life in the very first rock it has drilled from beneath the Martian surface - along with signs that the Red Planet was once capable of hosting primitive microbes. "It definitely has all the indications of being a habitable environment at one point in time," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said at a news conference in Washington.