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Curiosity flight director's family lives on 'Mars time'

If you happen to see a family in Southern California with kids ages 8, 10, and 13 at the beach just before midnight or perhaps bowling at 4 a.m., they're not related to Edward Cullen or any other vampires. They're just living on Martian time.

It's all part of NASA engineer David Oh's grand experiment to allow his family to share in an adventure of planetary proportions he's been involved in at work lately. Oh is the flight director for the Curiosity rover, currently wheeling its way along the surface of the Red Planet and occasionally blasting a Martian rock with a laser every now and then.… Read more

Curiosity sends back first full-resolution images

Not for the first time, and surely not for the last, we bring you another first from the Curiosity rover.

NASA has now released the first full-resolution images from Curiosity, which arrived on Mars late Sunday in a dramatic landing following an eight-month, one-way commute from Earth. The initial images sent back from the newly arrived rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, were low-res images, the better to get them back quickly and to help confirm that Curiosity was all in one piece.

The two just-released black-and-white images, which have been stitched together to show as a single … Read more

NASA video reveals Mars rover landing

NASA is offering a first video glimpse of the Curiosity rover's arrival on Mars.

The space agency last night released a modest stop-motion video built from 297 still-image frames captured by Curiosity's Mars Descent Imager, aka MARDI, which is mounted on the underside of the rover. The landing sequence, which finishes quickly in only about 40 seconds, provides a record of the last two-and-a-half minutes of the spacecraft's descent.

In the first few seconds, you can see the heat shield, 15 feet in diameter, falling away after separation from the 1-ton rover, which itself was slung below … Read more

iPhone processor way outguns Mars Curiosity rover's

If processor power were all that mattered in the space race, your iPhone 4S would be about ready to land on Pluto as part of a mission to send Siri to console it following its demotion from planet to just another big, cold rock floating in space.

F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen pointed out earlier today that the onboard computer specs in NASA's Mars Curiosity rover look pretty sad when stacked up against your basic smartphone, at least on paper.

An Apple A5 processor running at 800MHz is fully four times more powerful than the 200MHz chip aboard Curiosity. The 512MB of RAM on the iPhone 4S doubles what Curiosity packs, and if you've got 64GB on your phone, that's 32 times better than the rover.… Read more

Triumphant arrival on Mars? Check. What's next for Curiosity?

After its triumphant touchdown on Mars last night, it would be tempting to think that NASA's Curiosity rover is a complete success.

But while the part of the mission involving sending the one-ton rover on its 352 million journey to Mars ended in worldwide celebration, the real work hasn't even gotten started.

Over the coming weeks and months, NASA scientists have to ensure that everything on Curiosity is in working order, and only then will the rover take its first "baby steps," let alone begin to explore the many square kilometers of Martian terrain it was … Read more

NASA rover successfully lowered to surface of Mars

PASADENA, Calif.--In an unparalleled technological triumph, a one-ton nuclear-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered to the surface of Mars on the end of a 25-foot-long bridle suspended from the belly of a rocket-powered flying crane late Sunday to kick off an unprecedented $2.5 billion mission.

With flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory anxiously watching telemetry flowing in from Mars, 154 million miles away and 13.8 minutes after the fact, the Mars Science Laboratory rover -- Curiosity -- radioed confirmation of touchdown at 10:32 p.m. PDT (GMT-7; 1:32 a.… Read more

Watch NASA's live coverage of Mars rover landing

The arrival of the Curiosity rover on Mars may well be the biggest, boldest extraterrestrial landing for NASA since Apollo 11 settled down on the moon on a summer's night in 1969.

Curiosity is scheduled to land in the Red Planet's Gale Crater late Sunday or very, very early Monday, depending on your Earthbound time zone. Confirmation of the landing should come at about 10:31 p.m. PT Sunday for folks on the U.S. West Coast, or 1:31 a.m. ET Monday for those on the East Coast. The rover will have actually touched down … Read more

Mars rover: The next generation

Make way for Curiosity, a car-size Mars rover that will pick up where Spirit and Opportunity left off. It launches this month, and will arrive on the Red Planet next summer.

$2.5 billion Mars rover departs Earth, heads for red planet After a flawless launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, NASA's costly Mars Science Laboratory rover is safely on the way to Mars for a bold mission to study the habitability of the red planet. (Posted in Space Shot by William Harwood) November 26, 2011 3:17 a.m. PT

Ambitious Mars Science Lab rover set for Saturday launch … Read more