Ancient Mars lake could have supported life, Curiosity rover shows

NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of an ancient Martian lake that could have supported life as we know it for long stretches — perhaps millions of years.

This long and skinny freshwater lake likely existed about 3.7 billion years ago, researchers said, suggesting that habitable environments were present on Mars more recently than previously thought.

"Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like," said Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. [Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Life (Photos)]

"You've got an alluvial fan, which is being fed by streams that originate in mountains, that accumulates a body of water," Grotzinger told SPACE.com. "That probably was not unlike what happened during the last glacial maximum in the Western U.S."

Habitable Mars
The lake once covered a small portion of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater, which the 1-ton Curiosity rover has been exploring since touching down on the Red Planet in August 2012.

'Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like.'

- Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena

The main task of Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission is to determine whether Gale Crater could ever have supported microbial life. The rover team achieved that goal months ago, announcing in March that a spot near Curiosity's landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

The new results, which are reported Monday, Dec. 9, in six separate papers in the journal Science, confirm and extend Curiosity's landmark discovery, painting a more complete picture of the Yellowknife Bay area long ago.

This picture emerged from Curiosity's analysis of fine-grained sedimentary rocks called mudstones, which generally form in calm, still water. The rover obtained powdered samples of these rocks by drilling into Yellowknife Bay outcrops.

The mudstones contain clay minerals that formed in the sediments of an ancient freshwater lake, researchers said. Curiosity also spotted some of the key chemical ingredients for life in the samples, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon.

The lake could have potentially supported a class of microbes called chemolithoautotrophs, which obtain energy by breaking down rocks and minerals. Here on Earth, chemolithoautotrophs are commonly found in habitats beyond the reach of sunlight, such as caves and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

"It is exciting to think that billions of years ago, ancient microbial life may have existed in the lake's calm waters, converting a rich array of elements into energy," Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London, co-author of one of the new papers, said in a statement.

An icy Martian lake?
The shallow ancient lake may have been about 30 miles long by 3 miles wide, Grotzinger said. Based on the thickness of the sedimentary deposits, the research team estimates that the lake existed for at least tens of thousands of years — and perhaps much longer, albeit on a possibly on-and-off basis.

Taking into account the broader geological context, "you could wind up with an assemblage of rocks that represent streams, lakes and ancient groundwater systems — so for times when the lake might have been dry, the groundwater's still there. This could have gone on for millions or tens of millions of years," Grotzinger said.

The lack of weathering on Gale Crater's rim suggests that the area was cold when the lake existed, he added, raising the possibility that a layer of ice covered the lake on a permanent or occasional basis. But such conditions wouldn't be much of a deterrent to hardy microbes.

"These are entirely viable habitable environments for chemolithoautotrophs," Grotzinger said.

Researchers still don't know if the Gale Crater lake hosted organisms of any kind; Curiosity was not designed to hunt for signs of life on Mars. But if chemolithoautotrophs did indeed dominate the lake, it would put an alien twist on a superficially familiar environment.

"You can imagine that, if life evolved on Mars and never got beyond the point of chemolithoautotrophy, then in the absence of competition from other types of microbes, these systems might have been dominated by that type of metabolic pathway," Grotzinger said. "And that's an un-Earth-like situation."

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Scientists Bounce Laser Beams Off Old Soviet Moon Rover

Scientists have successfully bounced a laser off the Soviet Union's old Lunokhod 1 rover, which trekked across the moon's landscape more than four decades ago.

Lunokhod 1 was the first remote-controlled rover ever to land on another celestial body. The wheeled vehicle was carried to the lunar surface by a spacecraft called Luna 17, touching down in the Sea of Rains on Nov. 17, 1970.

Among its instruments, the rover toted a French-built laser retroreflector consisting of 14 corner cubes that can reflect laser light beamed from Earth. [The Moon: A Space Dumping Ground (Infographic)]

Attempts to contact the rover after the lunar night that began on Sept. 14, 1971, were unsuccessful, apparently due to a component failure on the rover. Lunokhod 1's days of rambling around the moon formally ended on Oct. 4, 1971, after 11 lunar day-night cycles (322 Earth days).

Laser ranging observations

For the most part, those working in the laser ranging field have cautioned over the years not to spend time on Lunokhod 1, calling the rover a nearly impossible target.

"And during 30 years, nobody tried to range on Lunokhod 1," Jean-Marie Torre, research engineer at the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France, told SPACE.com.

But Torre and his colleagues tried anyway, using the Grasse (MéO) laser-ranging station in Calern, France, which is run by the Côte d’Azur Observatory. In March, they received return signals from the Lunokhod 1 reflector for the first time since the start of their lunar laser ranging observation campaigns in the early 1980s.

The results were obtained over three nights, using a new instrumental configuration at the MéO station.

The historical difficulty of ranging on Lunokhod 1 may have been due to a number of factors. The reflector may have been dusty, or its cover could have closed. Or the rover may not have been parked in view of Earth, Torre said.

In the end, however, "it was more a problem of lack of confidence than to a technical difficulty," Torre said.

Poor weather conditions prevented the scientists from getting a good determination of the Lunokhod 1 reflector's efficiency. Still, the results have buoyed the interest of Earth-based scientists to continue beaming their lasers at the long-dead rover.

A retroreflector array was also left on the moon by the landing crew of NASA's Apollo 11 mission in 1969, while two more retroreflector arrays were set up by Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 moonwalkers.

In fact, Torre and a colleague were ranging successfully the Apollo 15 site when Torre suggested trying Lunokhod 1. [NASA's Apollo Moon Missions in Pictures]

"Fortunately, we had immediate echoes ... and if not, we might not have tried again for one or many years!"

Pinpointing Lunokhod's locale

The final end-of-mission location of Lunokhod 1 was uncertain until 2010. But thanks to images snapped by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), both the Luna 17 lander and Lunokhod 1 were spotted.

Lunokhod 1 came to its final stop on a site situated around 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) north of its point of landing.

The success last month by the Grasse station was not the first laser ranging effort targeting the "lost" Lunokhod 1 reflector.

In April 2010, specialists at the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation (APOLLO) in southern New Mexico used the LRO images to first pinpoint the locale of Lunokhod 1, closely enough for laser range measurements.

Surprisingly, the APOLLO researchers reported that the craft’s retroreflector was returning much more light than other reflectors on the moon.

"In normal conditions, the difficulty to range this [Lunokhod 1] reflector is the making of the corner cube [which is] silver coated. They are very good in the dark, from a few days after the new moon to the quarter. It is better to range the reflector from March to May," when the on-the moon reflector is the highest in the sky, Torre said.

A better understanding of the moon

Lunar laser ranging has been made possible by combining advances in laser technology, data processing and precision timing via atomic clocks, according to the International Laser Ranging Service, a service of the International Association of Geodesy.

Lunar laser ranging uses short-pulse lasers and state-of-the-art optical receivers and timing electronics to measure how long it takes light beamed from ground stations to travel to retroreflector arrays on the moon and back again.

It takes just two and a half seconds for light to make this roundtrip trek, requiring use of an atomic clock.

Because the reflectors on the moon are relatively small and a laser beam naturally loses its intensity with distance, only a tiny fraction of the signal makes it back. However, the information is sufficient for precise calculation of the Earth and moon's movement: speed of rotation, axial variation and orbital deviation (taking into account, of course, the influence of other celestial bodies such as the sun).

Torre said that thanks to Lunokhod 1's position on the moon -- closer to the moon’s limb than any other reflectors — it allows researchers to detect more precisely small libration effects. Laser ranging on the rover can improve researchers' understanding of the moon's internal structure and rotation, he added.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and is co-author of Buzz Aldrin’s new book “Mission to Mars — My Vision for Space Exploration” out in May from National Geographic. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.

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Mars Science by Curiosity Rover Hits New Snag

A new glitch on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has forced the vehicle to stay in safe mode longer than planned, stalling science operations for another couple of days, scientists said today (March 18).

The Curiosity rover had paused in its scientific investigation of the Red Planet in late February, when corrupted memory files forced engineers to switch the rover's main operations from its "A-side" computer to its "B-side" backup.

Just as the computer switch was sorted out, though, mission managers decided to put the rover back in standby mode on March 5 to protect it from possible radiation that could be released by a major solar flare pointed toward Mars. Curiosity had come out of safe mode following that scare, but normal science operations had not yet resumed.

Now, a computer file error has forced the rover into safe mode again.

"This is not something which is rare or extraordinary,"Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger said today at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. "It does mean that science has to stand down for a couple more days."

The latest issue has to do with some of the rover's files that were scheduled for deletion. One of those files was connected to a file still in use by the spacecraft, so the deletion process prompted an error that sent the rover into safe mode again, preventing the rover from resuming science as planned. [Curiosity Rover's Latest Amazing Mars Photos]

"If not for the latest safing, we would have been back in action today," Grotzinger said. "The expectation is, it's going to take a couple of sols [Martian days] to resolve this one."

Despite these technical setbacks, though, Curiosity's team of scientists has been forging ahead with analysis of the wealth of data collected by the rover so far. Those measurements allowed the researchers to declare last week the mission had found proof that a spot on ancient Mars would have provided habitable conditions to microbes, had they been present during the planet's past.

New research discussed today at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference elaborates on that finding, suggesting that those habitable conditions extended beyond the particular site named last week, which lies in an area called Yellowknife Bay.

While the first evidence of past habitability came from Curiosity's drill, which bored into rocks in Yellowknife Bay, the new findings of more widespread habitable conditions come from the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam), which has near-infrared filters that can detect iron-bearing rocks and hydrated (water-containing) minerals.

"With Mastcam, we see elevated hydration signals in the narrow veins that cut many of the rocks in this area," Melissa Rice of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "These bright veins contain hydrated minerals that are different from the clay minerals in the surrounding rock matrix."

The scientists were able to track variations in the amount of hydrated minerals in different locations, as well as between different layers of the Martian surface.

"A very significant message from the instrument data is that we are sensitive not only to the global variations, but also to the local variations," said Maxim Litvak of the Space Research Institute in Moscow, who is deputy principal investigator of Curiosity's Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument, which measures hydrogen on the Marian surface.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover, the centerpiece of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, landed on Mars in August 2012 after launching the previous November. The rover has already accomplished its main goal, which was to determine whether the Red Planet was ever habitable to microbial life. Though the answer to that query has now been settled, the larger question of whether such life ever existed on Mars remains open. 

Follow Clara Moskowitz @ClaraMoskowitz and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

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NASA's Mars rover resumes work after computer glitch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity resumed analysis of a sample of rock powder following a computer glitch that suspended operations for a week, scientists said on Monday.

Before the computer problem, results radioed back to Earth revealed that the rock, located near Curiosity's Gale Crater landing site, contains all the chemical ingredients necessary for microbial life, the over-arching goal of the planned two-year mission.

Scientists are eager for additional information about the rock sample, which was drilled out from what appears to be a slab of bedrock in an area known as Yellowknife Bay.

Curiosity automatically suspended its work on March 17 when it detected a problem with a computer data file. The glitch occurred as the rover was recovering from an earlier, unrelated computer problem.

The unplanned work hiatus ended over the weekend, NASA's deputy project manager Jim Erickson said.

"It's a slow recovery process, but we're back doing science," Erickson said.

Analysis of the rock powder will continue for about another week. Beginning April 4, radio communications between Earth and Mars will be blocked by the sun for a month, suspending most of the rover's science operations again.

When the planets re-align for communications after May 1, scientists plan to drill a second hole into the rock to verify the early results and look more closely for signs of organic carbon.

The $2.5 billion rover landed on Mars on August 6 to assess if the planet most like Earth has or ever had the chemical ingredients and environments for microbial life.

Scientists eventually plan to drive the rover to a 3-mile (5-km) high mound of what appears to be layered sediment rising from the floor of Gale Crater.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Lisa Shumaker)

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Mars Rover Curiosity Resumes Science Work After Computer Glitch

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has fully recovered from a glitch that knocked out its main computer system late last month, space agency officials say.  

The Curiosity rover has now resumed science work inside the Red Planet's huge Gale Crater. The car-size robot is monitoring Martian radiation and weather again, and it delivered more samples of powdered rock from a previous drilling operation to its onboard instruments on Saturday (March 23), rover team members said.

"We are back to full science operations," Curiosity deputy project manager Jim Erickson, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement Monday (March 25).

A complicated recovery

Curiosity had been operating pretty much flawlessly on the Red Planet until late February, when a memory glitch corrupted its main, or A-side, computer. Engineers swapped the rover over to its backup (B-side) computer, spurring Curiosity to go into a precautionary "safe mode" on Feb. 28. [Curiosity Rover's Latest Amazing Mars Photos]

As the team worked to fix the A-side, engineers also spent time checking out the B-side and configuring it for surface operations, as the A-side had been running Curiosity since a few weeks before the rover touched down on Mars the night of Aug. 5.

The rover's 10 science instruments can all be operated by either the A-side or the B-side computer, but other gear is not so flexible. For example, each of Curiosity's 12 engineering cameras is linked only to the main or the backup computer, researchers said.

"This was the first use of the B-side engineering cameras since April 2012, on the way to Mars," JPL's Justin Maki, team lead for these cameras, said in a statement. "Now we've used them on Mars for the first time, and they've all checked out OK."

Bringing the rover back up to speed has been delayed a few times by other events as well. In early March, engineers briefly put Curiosity on standby again to wait out a Mars-bound solar eruption. And on March 16, a separate software issue sent Curiosity into safe mode for a few days.

But all appears to be going well now. The B-side is running fine, NASA officials say, and the A-side is available as a backup if needed.

Communications blackout coming

Curiosity is getting back to work just in time for a lengthy communications blackout.

For much of next month, Mars will be almost directly behind the sun from Earth's perspective. Our star can disrupt interplanetary signals in this alignment, which occurs every 26 months and is known as a Mars solar conjunction.

Mission engineers don't want to take the chance of a corrupted command confusing the rover, so no directions will be sent to Curiosity from April 4 through May 1. Curiosity will continue to operate during this time, using a set of commands relayed in advance.

NASA's other Red Planet robots, such as the Opportunity rover and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will also be on their own for much of April.

Curiosity is the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission, which seeks to determine if the Red Planet could ever have hosted microbial life.

The rover has already accomplished its main goal. Earlier this month, Curiosity scientists announced that Mars was indeed habitable billions of years ago, basing their conclusion on the rover's analysis of rock samples it drilled from deep within a Red Planet outcrop.

The powdered rock samples Curiosity recently delivered to its instruments are additional specimens collected from that initial drilling operation. The rover won't drill another rock until after the Mars solar conjunction, team members have said.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.

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NASA Mars rover in safe mode; science halted

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Science experiments by the NASA Mars rover Curiosity have been put on hold as engineers troubleshoot a problem with its computer.

NASA says the car-size rover is in "safe mode." In this state, Curiosity suspends science activities but is still in contact with Earth.

Engineers discovered a problem with Curiosity's flash memory earlier this week and switched to its backup computer.

Curiosity landed last summer in Gale Crater near the Martian equator to examine whether environmental conditions were favorable for microbes. It recently drilled into a rock and transferred a pinch of powder to its onboard laboratories to study the chemical makeup. It won't be able to finish the analysis until its systems are back to normal.

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NASA: Mars rover snapped pic of rocket stage crash

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Space enthusiasts have been abuzz for days over whether the Mars rover Curiosity captured an extraterrestrial crash. On Friday, NASA declared the mystery solved.

Seconds after the car-size rover parked its six wheels in an ancient crater, a tiny camera under the chassis snapped a picture revealing a smudge on the horizon. The feature disappeared in a later photo.

Was it dirt on the camera lens or a spinning dust devil? It turned out Curiosity spotted the aftermath of its rocket-powered backpack crash-landing in the distance.

It "was an amazing coincidence that we were able to catch this impact," said engineer Steve Sell of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the $2.5 billion mission.

The nuclear-powered rover landed in Gale Crater near the equator Sunday night to study whether environmental conditions could have favored microbes. Its ultimate target is a mountain looming from the crater floor where mineral signatures of water have been spied.

Curiosity performed a novel, complex landing routine. In the final seconds, the rocket stage hovered as cables delicately lowered the rover to the ground. After landing, it cut the cords and the rocket stage flew out of the way, crashing 2,000 feet from the landing site.

Speeding at 100 mph, the high-speed impact kicked up a plume of dust — which showed up in Curiosity's field of view.

Curiosity was in the right place at the right time and facing the right direction, Sell said.

Since the feat, Curiosity has returned a flood of pictures including a 360-degree color view and a low-resolution video featuring the last minutes of its descent. Over the weekend, it will get a software update, a process that will take four days. During the hiatus, stored data will continue to be downloaded.

It will be weeks before Curiosity can take its first drive, zap at boulders or dig up soil in search of the chemical building blocks of life. The prime mission lasts two years.

A preliminary reconstruction of the "seven minutes of terror" plunge through the Martian atmosphere revealed everything went as planned. Curiosity ended up 1 1/2 miles downrange from the bull's-eye target, probably because of tail winds and a late steering turn.

"We're still happy where we landed," said Gavin Mendeck of the NASA Johnson Space Center.

___

Follow Alicia Chang's Mars coverage at http://www.twitter.com/SciWriAlicia

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Say cheese! NASA Mars rover photographs own shadow

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Even robots like to have fun. NASA's rover on Mars showed off its playful side by snapping a picture of its own shadow. It's the latest self-portrait since the rover, named Opportunity, landed on the red planet in 2004.

The photo was taken in March and NASA released it this week. The solar-powered, six-wheel rover was at an outcrop on the rim of a massive crater. The late afternoon sun set the crater aglow and Opportunity waited for just the right lighting to send a postcard back to Earth.

The result was a dramatic view of Opportunity casting a shadow with the crater in the background.

After nearly five months in one spot, the tireless rover is rolling again to explore more rocks.

Its twin, Spirit, stopped communicating in 2010.

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NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity Had Planetary Protection Slip-Up (SPACE.com)

All NASA spacecraft sent to other planets must undergo meticulous procedures to make sure they don't carry biological contamination from Earth to their destinations.

However, a step in these planetary protection measures wasn't adhered to for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, now en route to the Red Planet, SPACE.com has learned.

The incident has become a lessons-learned example of miscommunication in assuring that planetary protection procedures are strictly adhered to.

The issue involves a set of drill bits carried by the Curiosity rover, which launched Nov. 26 to Mars. When project developers made an internal decision not to send the equipment through a final ultra-cleanliness step, it marked a deviation from the planetary protection plans scripted for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. [Photos: Watching the Mars Rover Curiosity Blast Off ]

That judgment, however, didn't reach NASA's chief protector of the planets until "very late in the game," said Catharine "Cassie" Conley, NASA's planetary protection officer. "They didn't submit the request for the deviation not to comply with their planetary protection plan until several months ago," she emphasized.

Conley told SPACE.com that the initial plan called for placing all three of the drill bits inside a sterile box. Then, after Curiosity landed, the box would be opened for access to the sterilized bits via the rover's robot arm, extracted one by one and fit onto a drill head as the mission progressed.

But in readying the rover for departure to Mars, the box was opened, with one drill bit affixed to the drill head, Conley said. Also, all of the bits were tested pre-launch to assess their level of organic contamination. While done within a very clean environment, that work strayed from earlier agreed-to protocols, she said.

"That's where the miscommunication happened," Conley said. "I will certainly expect to have a lessons-learned report that will indicate how future projects will not have this same process issue. I'm sure that the Mars exploration program doesn't want to have a similar process issue in the future. We need to make sure we do it right."

Equatorial target

Conley said the deviation from protocol was reinforced by science and project officials concluding that Curiosity's target landing spot, Gale Crater, is free of potentially life-harboring ice — at least at depths that the drill bits would penetrate.

"That reinforced the reasonableness of not having the drill bits sterilized, because there's unlikely to be 'special regions' in the Gale Crater landing site," Conley said.

The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission was designed to comply with a requirement to avoid going to any site on the Red Planet known to have water or water-ice within 3.3 feet (1 meter) of the surface.

Adhering to cleanliness standards is a way to make sure the mission does not transport Earth life to Mars. Doing so preserves the ability to study that world in its natural state and also avoids contamination that would obscure an ability to find native life on that planet, if it exists.

Conley emphasized that the Curiosity assembly team and technicians did an excellent job of keeping Curiosity cleaner than any robot that NASA' s sent to Mars since the Viking lander in the 1970s.

Still, the decision to not keep the drill bits ultra-clean shows the process needs to be fixed, Conley said.

"It would have been better for them to check with me before they opened the box of bits to confirm that it was okay … rather than trying to ask for it afterwards," she said. "In this case it was fine. But for future missions we want to make sure that they ask beforehand."

Habitable environments

The Mars Science Laboratory is not a life-detection mission. Rather, it will study whether the Gale Crater area of Mars has evidence of past and present habitable environments.

"Direct life detection is inherently difficult, some would argue currently impossible, because there is no uniform agreement on life," said Scott Hubbard, the former "Mars Czar" for NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Hubbard is now a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., and author of the new book "Exploring Mars — Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery," published by the University of Arizona Press.

"There is no mathematical expression for life as there is gravity … only a series of attributes such as complexity, reproduction, metabolism, responsiveness and so on," Hubbard told SPACE.com. "We don't have a 'Star Trek' tricorder that says 'It's alive, Jim'."

Mars sample return

On-the-spot detection of life is difficult, underscoring the need to return to Earth well-selected samples from the Red Planet for analysis in a lab, Hubbard noted.

There are three reasons for pushing forward on a Mars return sample effort, he said: The best laboratory equipment can be employed, much of which cannot be reduced to spacecraft size; many labs and many scientists can be utilized to cross-check each other with alternate techniques; and discoveries can be followed and rechecked years later with new tools and techniques and hypotheses.

"The treaty-type agreements on planetary protection specify very rigorous levels of cleanliness to prevent forward and backward contamination," Hubbard said. "Spacecraft going to potential habitable zones on Mars must be cleaned to an amazing degree, even sterilized. Samples returned to Earth will be treated as if they were highly infectious until demonstrated otherwise."

Price tag estimates for a "Sample Receiving Facility" here on Earth have ranged as high as $300 million, Hubbard said. "Nevertheless, I think it is all worth it to find out 'Are we alone?'… 'Did life ever arise on Mars?'" he said.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of this year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

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NASA rover launched to seek out life clues on Mars

An artist's concept of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Tue Nov 29, 2011 3:51pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Florida on Saturday, launching a $2.5 billion nuclear-powered NASA rover toward Mars to look for clues on what could sustain life on the Red Planet.

The 20-story-tall booster built by United Launch Alliance lifted off from its seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 10:02 a.m. EST (3:02 p.m. GMT).

It soared through partly cloudy skies into space, carrying NASA's Mars Science Laboratory on a 354-million mile (556 million km), nearly nine-month journey to the planet.

"I think this mission is an important next step in NASA's overall goal to address the issue of life in the universe," lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told reporters shortly after the launch.

The car-sized rover, nicknamed Curiosity, is expected to touch down on August 6, 2012, to begin two years of detailed analysis of a 96-mile (154-km) wide impact basin near the Martian equator called Gale Crater.

The goal is to determine if Mars has or ever had environments to support life. It is the first astrobiology mission to Mars since the 1970s-era Viking probes.

Scientists chose the landing site because it has a three-mile-high (4.8-km high) mountain of what appears from orbital imagery and mineral analysis to be layers of rock piled up like the Grand Canyon, each layer testifying to a different period in Mars' history.

The rover has 17 cameras and 10 science instruments, including chemistry labs, to identify elements in soil and rock samples to be dug up by the probe's drill-tipped robotic arm.

'LONG SHOT'

The base of the crater's mountain has clays, evidence of a prolonged wet environment, and what appears to be minerals such as sulfates that likely were deposited as water evaporated.

Water is considered to be a key element for life, but not the only one.

Previous Mars probes, including the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, searched for signs of past surface water.

"We are not a life-detection mission," Grotzinger said. "We have no ability to detect life present on the surface of Mars. It's an intermediate mission between the search for water and future missions, which may undertake life detection."

With Curiosity, which is twice as long and three times heavier than its predecessors, NASA shifts its focus to look for other ingredients for life, including possibly organic carbon, the building block for life on Earth.

"It's a long shot, but we're going to try," Grotzinger said.

Launch is generally considered the riskiest part of a mission, but Curiosity's landing on Mars will not be without drama.

The 1,980-pound (898 kg) rover is too big for the airbag or thruster-rocket landings used on previous Mars probes, so engineers designed a rocket-powered "sky-crane" to gently lower Curiosity to the crater floor via a 43-foot (13-meter) cable.

"We call it the 'six-minutes of terror,'" said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, referring to the landing. "It is pretty scary, but my confidence level is really high."

Curiosity is powered by heat from the radioactive decay of plutonium. It is designed to last one Martian year, or 687 Earth days.

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Rover probes role water may have played on Mars

The arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is seen extended toward a light-toned rock, ''Tisdale 2'', during the 2,695th Martian day, or ''sol'', of the rover's work on Mars, in this picture taken by the rover's front hazard-avoidance camera on August 23, 2011. The rock, ''Tisdale 2'', is about 12 inches (30 cm) tall. The rover used two instruments on the robotic arm, the microscopic imager and the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, to examine Tisdale 2. In this image, the turret at the end of the arm is positioned so that the microscopic imager is facing the rock.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Fri Sep 2, 2011 8:13am EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is uncovering new details about the role water may have played on what is now a cold, dry planet, scientists said on Thursday.

Opportunity is one of two small rovers that landed on opposite sides of Mars in January 2004 for what were expected to be 90-day studies to look for signs of the past presence of water on the planet. Water is believed to be a key ingredient for life.

Sister probe Spirit succumbed to the harsh Martian environment last year, leaving Opportunity to go solo until the U.S. space agency's next rover, Curiosity, arrives in August 2012.

Opportunity originally touched down near the equator in an area called Meridiani Planum and almost immediately discovered evidence the plain was once covered by shallow, salty and highly acidic water. It later spent two years studying exposed bedrock and other features in a small crater named Victoria.

At a new destination, a 14-mile- (22-km) wide crater named Endeavour, Opportunity has discovered a different type of terrain with a chemical makeup unlike anything previously encountered.

"We may soon be able to study clay minerals and rock types that formed in low-acid, wet conditions, which may tell us more about a potentially habitable environment," Dave Lavery, who oversees the Mars Exploration Rovers program at NASA headquarters in Washington, told reporters during a conference call.

The first rock probed by Opportunity at Endeavour Crater shows very high levels of zinc, which on Earth is commonly found in rocks that have been exposed to hot water, such as thermal springs.

"This rock doesn't look like anything else we've ever seen before," said Cornell University planetary scientist Steve Squyres, the lead rover scientist. "We are thinking very hard over what this means."

The rock is basically basalt, a common volcanic rock, which was cemented together from fragments of other rocks shattered by an impact, for example.

"We may be dealing with a situation where water has percolated or flowed -- somehow moved through these rocks, maybe as vapor, maybe as liquid, don't know yet -- but has enhanced the zinc concentration in the rock to levels far in excess of anything that we have seen on Mars before," Squyres said.

Scientists plan to look for other zinc-rich rocks to see if the concentrations are the same, as well as probe for other minerals likewise tied to water.

Opportunity is on the hunt for bedrock, in particular, which is rock that has not been moved by impacts or other processes.

"We've got some strange stuff going on, but we're not ready to draw any firm conclusions," Squyres said.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Peter Cooney)

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NASA Prepares Next Mars Rover for November Launch (SPACE.com)

Robert Z. Pearlman, SPACE.com contributor
Space.com Robert Z. Pearlman, Space.com Contributor
space.com – Sat Aug 13, 12:30 pm ET

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA's next Mars rover, the car-size Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, is almost ready to fly to the Red Planet.

Beginning tomorrow (Aug. 13), technicians at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida will begin folding up the six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover to pack it inside its heat shield.

Targeted to launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral on the day after Thanksgiving (Nov. 25), Curiosity was shown off to the media on Friday inside the clean room where it has been undergoing final tests and preparations for its journey to Mars. [Photos: NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity]

The rover, which at 10 feet (3 meters) long has been likened to the size of a Mini Cooper, was in its fully-deployed posture. The next time it will be in the same configuration will be after it is deposited on the surface of Mars in August 2012.

"We're going to start buttoning up the hatches here," said Torsten Zorn, a robotics engineer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Tuck and stow

Over the next three or so days, Zorn and his fellow team members will work to fold down Curiosity's high-gain antenna, which will enable the rover to communicate directly with Earth. Technicians will also lock down the Remote Sensing Mast, which supports Curiosity's two stereo navigation cameras used for driving the rover and two science instruments to investigate the rover's surroundings.

They will also fold up Curiosity's instrument-tipped arm, capable of reaching out more than 7 feet (2 meters) to collect and study samples of the Martian surface.

Finally, technicians will tuck in Curiosity's six wheels, which are designed to roll the rover over obstacles up to 25 inches (65 centimeters) high and to travel distances up to 660 feet (200 meters) per day on the Martian terrain.

"[We] just fold them up, like a little insect," Zorn said.

Packing for flight

Once all the folding, stowing and tucking is complete, the Curiosity rover will be ready to be mated with its descent stage vehicle and then fitted inside a tightly-packaged cruise stage and aeroshell that will protect the rover on its nine-month trip to Mars. That whole package will then be placed inside a protective shell called a fairing and eventually stacked atop the Atlas 5 rocket.

In the days leading up to liftoff, engineers will install Curiosity's nuclear power source: a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which produces electricity from the heat of plutonium-238's radioactive decay. This long-lived power supply will provide Curiosity with an operating lifespan on Mars' surface of at least a full Mars year (687 Earth days, or 1.9 Earth years).

After arriving at Mars, the spacecraft will steer itself through Mars' atmosphere with a series of S-curve maneuvers similar to those used by astronauts piloting NASA's now-retired space shuttles. During the three minutes before touchdown, the spacecraft will slow its plunge to the ground with a parachute, then use retro rockets mounted around the rim of an upper stage to further slow its approach.

In the final seconds before Curiosity's landing, the upper stage will act as a sky crane, lowering the upright rover on a tether to the surface. [Video: Curiosity to Make Unusual Landing on Mars]

Bigger and better

Curiosity is about twice as long and five times as heavy as NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which launched in 2003 and are still on the Martian surface.

Curiosity inherited many design elements from its earlier, smaller cousins — including six-wheel drive, a "rocker-bogie" suspension system and cameras mounted on a mast to help the mission's team on Earth select exploration targets and driving routes. However,  unlike Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity has equipment to gather samples of rocks and soil, process them and distribute them to onboard test chambers that are inside analytical instruments.

Those instruments include some of the most advanced scientific gear ever used on Mars' surface and a payload more than 10 times as massive as those of the earlier Mars rovers. Using these tools, Curiosity will investigate whether conditions on Mars may be favorable for microbial life today and for preserving clues in the rocks about possible past life.

Robert Pearlman is a SPACE.com contributor and editor of collectSPACE.com. You can follow him @robertpearlmanor on Facebook. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcomand on Facebook.

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NASA's Next Mars Rover Lands ... in Florida (SPACE.com)

NASA's next Mars rover to explore the Red Planet landed in Florida yesterday (June 22) after a cross-country flight, marking a key milestone on the road to its planned launch this fall.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, also known as Curiosity, arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane. Also making the trip was the novel rocket-powered descent stage that will fly the rover during the final moments before landing on Mars, NASA officials said.

The C-17 took off from March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, Calif. The rover and the descent stage had been trucked there from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in nearby Pasadena. JPL is managing the $2.5 billion MSL mission.

The rover's aeroshell and cruise stage — which will protect the rover and guide it, respectively, during the nine-month journey to the Red Planet — arrived at Kennedy last month. The MSL mission is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, and the car-size rover should touch down on Mars in August 2012. [Video: Curiosity to Make Unusual Landing on Mars]

"The design and building part of the mission is nearly behind us now," said JPL's David Gruel, manager of MSL assembly, test and launch operations. "We're getting to final checkouts before sending the rover on its way to Mars."

The rover and other spacecraft components will undergo more testing in Florida before mission staff stack them and fuel the onboard propulsion systems.

Curiosity should be enclosed in its aeroshell for the final time in September and delivered to Kennedy's Launch Complex 41 in early November for integration with a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, NASA officials said.

Curiosity is about twice as long and more than five times as heavy as any previous Mars rover. Its 10 science instruments include two for ingesting and analyzing samples of powdered rock delivered by the
rover's robotic arm.

During a prime mission lasting one Martian year (nearly two Earth years), researchers will use the rover's tools to study whether Curiosity's landing region is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life. Mission planners have narrowed the possible landing sites to four choices and are expected to select one soon.

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