There is nothing particularly scientific about this image, but it is remarkably evocative. The Curiosity rover on Mars took a self-portrait of its primary camera masthead using another camera (the rather charmingly named “Mars Hand Lens Imager” or MAHLI)  mounted on its robotic arm on Sept 7th 2012. In part the image was made to [...]

Ok, so every so often something comes along that just blows away everything you’ve seen before. This is one of those things. Soon after Curiosity made landfall we got to see a glimpse of a low-resolution and highly compressed time-lapse video of the descent, showing the heat-shield fall away and a precipitous drop to the [...]

A funny thing happened recently on the way to Mars. A few days after the successful launch of NASA’s behemoth Curiosity rover with its Mars Science Laboratory instruments on November 26th 2011, a somewhat muted piece of news came out admitting that the strict biological planetary protection rules had not been adhered to quite as [...]

This, I guarantee, is a view of NASA’s Curiosity rover embarking on its 250 day trip to Mars that you may not have seen before. It’s an extraordinary piece of time-lapse footage taken from Australia not long after launch from Cape Canaveral. It shows a glowing plume from the Centaur stage after a burn over [...]

Starting this Saturday, a 24 day window of opportunity opens for the launch of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, now also known as the Curiosity rover. If all goes well (very well) then in August 2012 a new visitor will barrel down into the martian atmosphere through a six-and-a-half minute maneuver involving hypersonic speeds, air-braking, parachutes, [...]

When Curiosity landed three weeks ago today, many news stories were quick to point out it is the biggest rover to date. They said it’s car-sized. But what does that mean – are we talking a Hummer or a Mini? And how did its predecessors measure up? While snooping around NASA’s Mars mission sites, I [...]