Mission to Mt. Sharp – Habitability, Preservation of Organics, and Environmental Transitions Senior Review Proposal Sections 1 and 2 April 2014 Keith’s note: Jim Green just made a point of spelling out the URL for this report. He did so rather defensively in an effort to show that there was a science plan in place for MSL. In the process he sought to minimize the comments made by NASA’s own […]

NASA Holds Teleconference to Discuss Science Campaign of Curiosity Mars Rover Keith’s note: NASA SMD PAO’s Dwayne Brown continues to refuse to respond to media inquiries from last month’s Mars 2020 media opportunity – despite overtly soliciting such inquiries. Let’s see who Dwayne ignores during this briefing – since he’s NASA PAO – and I am not. As such I am not going to bother to dial in since it […]

NASA Holds Teleconference to Discuss Science Campaign of Curiosity Mars Rover “NASA will host a teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Thursday, Sept. 11, to discuss mission status and the future science campaign for the Mars rover Curiosity mission.” NASA Planetary Senior Review Panel Report “Unfortunately the lead Project Scientist was not present in person for the Senior Review presentation and was only available via phone. Additionally, he was not present […]

Keith’s note: NASA has spent $2 billion on Curiosity. But NASA allows researchers to post the research results – results paid for by taxpayers – behind a paywall at Science. You have to pay twice if you want to see what has been discovered. Too bad NASA is not interested in following OSTP guidelines on Open Data, Transparency, etc. Keith’s update: Note: the papers from the 24 January issue of […]

Keith’s note: At bottom of this release “Mars Rover Teams Dub Sites in Memory of Bruce Murray“, JPL has included “For more information about Opportunity, visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov . For more information about Curiosity, visit http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl“ . Two missions – five websites. First for the Opportunity links. if you go to http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ you do not get anything on Opportunity but rather its a Curiosity page. […]

Water for Future Mars Astronauts?, LANL “Perhaps most notable among findings from the ChemCam team is that all of the dust and fine soil contains small amounts of water.” A Martian Igneous Rock That’s Surprisingly Earth-like, Caltech “But Curiosity is far more than a one-trick rover, and in a paper published today in the journal Science, a team of MSL scientists reports its analysis of a surprisingly Earth-like Martian rock […]

Curiosity Rover Debuts Autonomous Navigation “NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has used autonomous navigation for the first time, a capability that lets the rover decide for itself how to drive safely on Mars. The capability uses software that engineers adapted to this larger and more complex vehicle from a similar capability used by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which is also currently active on Mars. Using autonomous navigation, or autonav, Curiosity […]

Dr. John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, 3rd from left, meets with members of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory team on Thursday, August 1, 2013 at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington. August 6, 2013 EDT will mark the first anniversary of the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars. Larger image Keith’s note: I am the first one to complain that NASA does not touch […]

NASA Curiosity Rover Approaches First Anniversary on Mars, NASA “NASA’s Curiosity rover will mark one year on Mars next week and has already achieved its main science goal of revealing ancient Mars could have supported life. The mobile laboratory also is guiding designs for future planetary missions. … Curiosity team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.,will share remembrances about the dramatic landing night and the mission […]

Billion-Pixel View of Mars Comes From Curiosity Rover, NASA JPL “A billion-pixel view from the surface of Mars, from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, offers armchair explorers a way to examine one part of the Red Planet in great detail. The first NASA-produced view from the surface of Mars larger than one billion pixels stitches together nearly 900 exposures taken by cameras onboard Curiosity and shows details of the landscape along […]