Quantcast
06|01|13 ISSUE
issue
Read articles, including Science News stories written for ages 9-14, on the SNK website.
Home / News
Curiosity Rover on Mars
Ongoing coverage of the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft

Web edition: August 3, 2012

A+ A- Text Size

Ongoing coverage of the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft

Web edition: August 3, 2012

Enlarge
NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Curiosity Rover touched down on Mars on Sunday night, August 5, Pacific time. The rover’s 98-week mission, dedicated to finding signs of habitable environments on Mars, will explore an enormous crater just south of the planet’s equator and climb the flanks of a 5-kilometer-high mountain. Below is a compendium of Curiosity coverage by Science News; visit often to satisfy your own need to know about the mission’s progress.

News

Wheels down, Mars rover takes in the view
After a safe landing, NASA’s Curiosity begins transmitting images back to Earth.
By Nadia Drake | August 6, 2012 | Read more

Curiosity lands safely on Mars
Lowered by sky crane onto the surface, NASA rover prepares to look for signs that life could have evolved on the Red Planet.
By Nadia Drake | August 6, 2012 | Read more

Curiosity to look for habitable environs
Set to land on Mars August 5, NASA mission will search for signs that the planet could support life, now or long ago.
By Nadia Drake | August 1, 2012 | Read more

Curiosity readies for dramatic entrance
NASA’s new Mars rover aims to alight on the Red Planet like a pop star being lowered onto stage.
By Nadia Drake | July 31, 2012 | Read more

Blogs

A lifetime of curiosity: An interview with JPL director Charles Elachi
Nadia Drake speaks with the lab head days before the Mars Science Laboratory’s scheduled landing.
By Nadia Drake | August 4, 2012 | Read more

Mission control before the party
Days before Curiosity's planned Martian landing, Nadia Drake checks out JPL's space central.
By Nadia Drake | August 3, 2012 | Read more

Young scientist crosses fingers for Mars rover
Ryan Anderson’s graduate work helped researchers select Curiosity’s landing site in Gale Crater.
By Nadia Drake | August 1, 2012 | Read more

Comment
Print Friendly and PDF

Comments (2)

Please alert Science News to any inappropriate posts by clicking the REPORT SPAM link within the post. Comments will be reviewed before posting.

  • If you want to get some feel for what it's like to be a flight controller watching telemetry from Curiosity, download NASA's next-generation mission operations software, Mission Control Technologies (MCT). My team at NASA Ames Research Center recently made it open source and free under the Apache 2.0 license. The demo version can be downloaded and run with no computer knowledge, and does almost everything that the full version does, except save the displays you create. (Sorry, the demo version shows only fake data, though we are working on a plugin to let you see a small amount of real ISS data.)

    JPL's Curiosity team will not be using MCT initially, because we had it ready too late for their schedule, but MCT's views are similar to the views of the software that the Curiosity flight controllers are using, so you can get some idea. We have even built the data adapter so MCT can show Curiosity data, and have demonstrated it at JPL. On our web site there is also a three-minute overview video and a Quick Start Guide. Be sure to plug in the example plugins from the Plug Ins page! Find our web site by searching the internet for "NASA open MCT". Also check out our blog, which is linked from our web site.
    Tom Dayton Tom Dayton
    Aug. 6, 2012 at 8:09am
  • Thats really awesome. but they need to get what the difference is between earth water and mars water, what rocks come out of mars volcanoes, and stuff like that and but i will be amazed!
    Tucker Sears Tucker Sears
    Jan. 10, 2013 at 2:46am
Registered readers are invited to post a comment. To encourage fruitful discussion, please keep your comments relevant, brief and courteous. Offensive, irrelevant, nonsensical and commercial posts will not be published. (All links will be removed from comments.)

You must register with Science News to add a comment. To log-in click here. To register as a new user, follow this link.

Follow Us
features
MORE Features>>
most read