curiosity

What were you hoping for with the big juicy Mars discovery that a NASA researcher hinted at? Aliens? Kuato? Jimmy Hoffa?

As you'll no doubt recall, NASA investigator John Grotzinger was quoted as saying that data from the Curiosity rover suggested a discovery of epic significance. Well, here's your official oven-fresh serving of disappointment.

Today NASA confirmed there's no earth-shaking finding from the soil samples analyzed with Curiosity's on-board chemistry lab. … Read more

Peter Molyneux and his team of six programmers at 22Cans scrambled to cope when their first game, Curiosity, arrived on Apple's App Store a day early and high demand walloped the company's servers.

Here's a blow-by-blow look at how the English startup struggled through the launch and eventually recovered its poise. For a look at Molyneux' plans for the cube-tapping game, check our related coverage of 22Cans' Curiosity and other video game plans.

October 31: 22Cans, a startup closely watched in gaming circles based on Molyneux's decades-long track record, posts on its Facebook page that its … Read more

For storied video game designer Peter Molyneux, November 6 was supposed to be the calm before the storm. But it became the storm itself when his newest project, Curiosity, arrived a day early and exploded in popularity.

Molyneux's new gaming startup, 22Cans, planned to launch Curiosity on November 7. Twenty-two hours ahead of time, though, Apple's App Store published the "experiment," which is something like letting thousands of people pop the same sheet of bubble wrap at the same time.

So began a roller-coaster ride that combined a humiliating server failure with an intriguing new take … Read more

Let's review what we know about NASA's Martian secret heard round the solar system last week:

An NPR reporter happened to be recording in the office of the lead scientist for the Curiosity rover as some data from the rover's on-board chemistry lab was coming in. When pressed by the reporter to interpret the data, NASA's John Grotzinger declined, commenting simply that the "data is going to be one for the history books."… Read more

It seems NASA and the Curiosity rover have found something exciting and nerd-tastic on Mars, but the space agency's scientists are holding back for now, despite how painful it appears to be for them.

NPR science correspondent Joe Palca happened to be in the room recently when John Grotzinger, lead scientist for the Curiosity mission at NASA, started receiving data on his computer from the rover's on-board chemistry lab, also known as SAM (sample analysis at Mars). SAM and NASA scientists on Earth have been busy analyzing a sample of Martian soil of late, and apparently the dirt from the Red Planet has a secret to tell.

"This data is going to be one for the history books, it's looking really good," Grotzinger said in the story that aired yesterday.

And that's about all he said.… Read more

"Now, this is the plan. Get your ass to Mars."

We all remember Schwarzenegger motivating himself to go to the Red Planet in "Total Recall" (anyone bother watching the remake?) and sure we'd like to go too. Now NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has determined that radiation levels on the planet's surface are safe for human explorers.

"The astronauts can live in this environment," Don Hassler, principal investigator on Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector instrument (RAD), told a news conference.

"Basically, we're finding that the Mars atmosphere is acting as a shield for the radiation on the surface and as the atmosphere gets thicker, that provides more of a shield and therefore we see a dip in our radiation dose," Hassler said.

The findings mark the first time that cosmic rays have been measured on the surface of another planet, and come 100 years after Victor Hess discovered cosmic rays on Earth by using a hot-air balloon.… Read more

Buffeted by ethereal whirlwinds and twisters, the Curiosity Mars rover is wrapping up initial soil analysis operations at a sandy drift where it's been parked for more than a month, project scientists said today. The rover is now being prepared to move on in search of suitable targets for a compact rock drill, the final major sample acquisition system to be tested.

Ashwin Vasavada, the deputy project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters that Curiosity's robot arm had completed five scoops of martian soil, using the sandy … Read more

Video game designer Peter Molyneux has a proven track record of successful games (Fable and Black and White are the biggies) and a style unique enough to inspire a hilarious parody account on Twitter. Molyneux was recently the head of Microsoft's gaming division, but left the company earlier this year to form his own game shop, 22Cans. Yesterday, 22Cans released its first game (or "experiment") for iOS and Android: Curiosity, a massively multiplayer puzzler that promises a "life-changingly amazing" secret to the one (and only one) gamer who can make it to the middle of … Read more

It's as if you've just strolled up to Curiosity on the surface of Mars and surprised the rover as -- convinced that everyone at Mission Control is on a coffee break -- it's decided to ditch the scientific research for a bit and build a martian sand castle instead.

One of the latest Curiosity images posted by NASA is a stunning self-portrait made up of 55 high-rez images taken by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager. The base of Mount Sharp serves as a dramatic backdrop, swooping up toward the right, and in front of the rover, you can see four hand-size holes in the ground where Curiosity had just started building its sand castle gathered scoops of martian dirt for analysis. The scoop site is poetically named "Rocknest."… Read more