NASA may be on the edge of its seat as it waits to see if its aging Opportunity rover will wake back up from its extended downtime, but it’s not the only piece of scientific hardware on the Red Planet. The trusty Curiosity rover is still going strong, and after spending over a year at …
NASA’s Curiosity rover is a powerful machine with some impressive capabilities when it comes to analyzing material samples, drilling into Martian rocks, and snapping images of the planet’s surface. Despite all that, an incredibly low-tech feature on the rover is helping NASA understand Mars’ seasons and, in particular, how hard the wind blows. The planet-wide …
NASA has had a recent run of incredible success with its Mars missions. The possibly-now-dead Opportunity rover has already managed to outlast its expected lifespan by well over a decade, and the Curiosity rover recently relearned how to drill rocks to overcome a potentially devastating setback. Now, to ensure its streak of success isn’t halted, …
NASA’s rover situation on Mars is, well, complicated. The aging Opportunity rover was swallowed up by the planet-wide dust storm that covered Mars earlier this summer and hasn’t woken back up since. The rover’s extended mission is currently in limbo while NASA waits to see if it still has some life left in it, so …
NASA’s Opportunity rover might be taking an extended nap at the moment (please don’t say it’s dead!) but the Curiosity rover is wide awake and doing a whole bunch of science stuff. The nuclear-powered robot, which didn’t experience any significant downtime in the wake of the dust storm that brought down its older sibling, just …
Despite what so many people would love to believe, NASA hasn’t discovered any evidence of past or present intelligent life on Mars. So, when the Curiosity rover stumbled upon what appeared to be a very suspicious chunk of something on the Red Planet’s surface, they were not only surprised but also a little bit worried. …
NASA’s Curiosity rover has been doing some fantastic work on Mars, and even though it had to basically reinvent how it uses its primary sampling tool it’s managed to get back to work anyway. Unfortunately for the rover’s handlers, one of the first new targets that they picked to drill into has actually managed to …
The colossal dust storm on Mars that has already enveloped the Curiosity rover is now a planet-wide event. In a new bulletin, NASA explains that the dust storm has finally managed to make it around the entire planet, producing a haze in the atmosphere that obscures sunlight and offers scientists a great opportunity to study …
Mars isn’t a great place to be right now. Well, it’s really never a great place to be, at least not for the past billion years or so, but the past few weeks have been especially rough as a massive dust storm is rapidly swallowing up the planet. The storm has already caused NASA’s Opportunity …
When you’re doing some home improvements and a tool breaks it can be a pretty frustrating experience. I mean you have to go all the way to the hardware store for a replacement, and have you seen the parking situation at Home Depot? Forget it, that door hinge can stay broken, I’m going to watch …
