NASA's Curiosity rover worked through the holiday season on Mars
by taking a close look at an intriguing bit of Martian terrain,
a region scientists have lovingly nicknamed "Grandma's House."
The Curiosity rover is currently parked inside Yellowknife Bay,
a shallow depression of odd terrain nestled inside the rover's
vast Gale crater landing site. "Grandma's House" is an informal
name for Curiosity's holiday spot inside the bay, rover team
member Colette Lohr said in a NASA video. "This is a really
exciting time for the team because we've started to do what we
call discovery-driven planning," said Lohr, Curiosity tactical
uplink lead at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"And this is, in a sense, when we hand the rover keys to the
science team." Space news from NBCNews.com Teen's space mission
fueled by social media Science editor Alan Boyle's blog:
"Astronaut Abby" is at the controls of a social-media machine
that is launching the 15-year-old from Minnesota to Kazakhstan
this month for the lif