E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo
This colorized view is part of a panorama produced by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo from NASA imagery. The picture shows NASA's Curiosity rover putting its drill to work at Yellowknife Bay on Mars. Click on the picture to see a larger version, and visit KenKremer.com for more from Ken Kremer.
Even as the scientists behind NASA's Curiosity rover mission announced that they found evidence of life-friendly chemistry inside a Martian rock, the $2.5 billion mission's engineers continued their efforts to get the rover back into full operation after a serious computer glitch.
The rover's scientific work in a spot known as Yellowknife Bay has been put on hold while the mission operations team rebuilds the memory for one of Curiosity's two redundant computers, known as the A-side. The A-side computer experienced a memory failure on Feb. 28, forcing controllers to switch over to the B-side backup brain. Since then, the team has been putting the A-side through a series of tests to make sure it's OK.
"We have been able to store new data in many of the memory locations previously affected and believe more runs will demonstrate more memory is available," Jim Erickson, the mission's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Monday in a status report. A couple of software patches are due to be uploaded and tested this week, and then the team will reassess when to resume full mission operations, including the analysis of additional rock samples.
Engineers still don't know why the A-side failed, although they suspect it may have been due to a cosmic-ray hit. Such hits are thought to have affected Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the past. After the computer system returns to full redundant mode, the B-side will continue to operate as Curiosity's main computer while the A-side serves as backup, NASA spokesman Guy Webster told NBC News on Wednesday.
This animation provides a 360-degree spin around the first bore hole drilled by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on Feb. 8. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Marco Di Lorenzo / Ken Kremer (www.kenkremer.com)
Mars is heading into a solar conjunction in April that will interfere with communications between Curiosity and Mission Control, and science operations will have to be suspended again during that hiatus. That means the rover won't drill out another sample of rock powder from Yellowknife Bay until May.
Scientists say Yellowknife Bay could have been a riverbed or lake bed in ancient times — just the right kind of place for figuring out what Mars was like billions of years ago.
"I have an image now of possibly a lake, a freshwater lake on a Mars with probably a thicker atmosphere, maybe a snow-capped Mount Sharp. Who knows?" said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate.
Curiosity's science team members are so intrigued by what they've been finding that they're willing to go slow with the rover's long-planned trip to Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) peak in the middle of Mars' Gale Crater. The layers of rock that make up that mountain, also known as Aeolis Mons, are thought to preserve Mars' geological record over billions of years.
"When we start driving to Mount Sharp, and you see us dragging our feet as we go along there and stop to look at a few things, that's because we'll be trying to figure out how the rocks we're at now, at Yellowknife Bay, relate to Mount Sharp," said Caltech's John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist.
Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.
Extra credit: The Mars Curiosity crew is coming in for more accolades. The Mars Science Laboratory Project, which is in charge of building and operating the rover, has been selected to receive the National Air and Space Museum's Trophy for Current Achievement at a ceremony next month. Meanwhile, the folks who manage Mars Curiosity's online persona have won the 2013 South by Southwest Interactive Award for best social media campaign. Congratulations to the "hive mind" behind @MarsCuriosity on Twitter.
More about Mars:
- Organics found, but are they from Mars?
- Radar reveals traces of huge Martian flood
- Cosmic Log archive on Mars
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Leave a Comment:
still amazed they did it. Congrats NASA
So what happens if Side B gets nuked? Just asking, if these the ram could be fried so easily you would think more backups would have been included. Would kind of suck to get it to Mars, start to make some rudimentary findings and then have your bot zapped by the universe as if your fleeting attempt at understanding what Mars was in the past was slapped down by the powers that be in jest at your petulance for attempting such a thing...
Here's hoping Curiosity was not named after a cat, we all know the saying.
Science procedes one failure at time. Just think, if we reaped the estimated 70 billion/yr in taxes Churches aren't required to pay to the IRS, we could send dozens of sophisticated robots annually.
In it's own way, faith continues to dampen the progress of science even in the 21st century.
Is that the best you can do atheist? Churches? How about mosques and synagogues? Are you a muslim in jihad or just an idiot with blinders? There are many other things that our government wastes money on that could go to exploration of space but your best effort is blaming churches. Back to the moon, to mars, man has some exploring to do. Why don't you bitch about an idiot president canceling space programs?
I'm sure of one thing...I've already gotten my money's worth out of this thing! Fascinating stuff.
Curiosity has already accomplished its main mission--all the rest is gravy from here on...
I hope it can survive long enough to provide good info on the subject of life in the past (or present).
NASA was great. But under Obama NASA is becoming inferior. For reasons I don't understand, Obama hates science and technology. He clearly doesn't understand it and probably has never taken a statistics course or a junior level science course. The US is in decline under Obama. His home city, Chicago, has a grade level reading rate of 20%! This is what Democrats want in order to get votes. Dang, I really wish the US had a honest, unbiased, intelligent new media. The US news media today looks worse than China's!
@rober34, perhaps you should do just a BIT more research before posting... NASA was going down before Obama's presidency.
NASA was great but like many things, became bloated. Now we can thank SpaceX for getting us back in the running again. Based on your comment, you sound like a republican. You should be all for privatizing space with Space X. I am more democratic but I am fully behind the Space X venture. I am very grateful we have visionaries like Elon Musk. We certaintly couldn't rely on 99.99% of the people posting on message boards like this to drive our species forward.
As far as reading level goes, blame the parents. They are after all...the parents. If you can't spend time to help with your child, then you shouldn't have one. If the children were taught to respect others and teachers, the entire school system would be better. Instead they are influenced by rap, gangs and biebers. Truly sad.
Recently, the science blogs have been invaded by a bunch of right wing nutjobs who make it their life mission to deride every new and interesting discovery. I wouldn't worry too much about them.