Curiosity Mars mission
NASA has released the first photo of the Curiosity rover in flight, after the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's (MRO) HiRISE camera snapped a shot of the spacecraft parachuting down to the Martian surface.
The MRO was 340km away from Curiosity as its parachute was deployed, slowing the craft from around 900mph to 180mph, before …

NASA has released the first radiation readings taken by the Curiosity rover on Mars, and it looks as though astronauts should be able to stay on the planet for at least six months without significant health risks.
Curiosity is the first rover to take radiation readings from another planet using its Radiation Assessment Detector …

NASA has announced that the Curiosity rover has found evidence of a fast-moving stream that once flowed over the Martian surface.
"From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Curiosity science co-investigator William …

YouTube was a bit keen in the prosecution of copyright laws during NASA's victorious Curiosity rover landing yesterday morning, booting the first video excerpt of the livestream off its site for infringing a news service.
NASA's video coverage and pics are actually generally copyright-free, which made the overzealous bot …

With a $2.5bn price tag, a 350-million mile journey and 2 million lines of C and some C++ code, the only bugs NASA wants its Curiosity rover to find are those possibly beneath the Martian surface.
And it may not be a particularly glamorous job, but software analysis outfit Coverity was the company tasked with "ensuring that …

Astrobotic Technology, a privately funded spacecraft developer, has announced that its has completed a full-size prototype of its second Moon rover, Polaris, which is scheduled to fly in October 2015 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Polaris is one of two Moon rovers under development by Astrobotic in competition for the Google …

Pic
Mars watchers have spotted another weird object on the surface of the Red Planet: images uploaded from the Curiosity rover feature a small, nearly perfect sphere that was photographed by the machine's MastCam.
Mars ball
Mars has a tiny ball (click to enlarge)
The photo, which was snapped on September 11 and posted on NASA …

The European Space Agency has used an off-the-shelf quadcopter to demonstrate the latest output of its StarTiger rapid-development program: precision guidance and safe delivery of a rover-like vehicle onto a simulated Mars surface.
Getting to Mars is one thing, but as the ESA knows only too well, executing a successful landing …

Windows 10 will include full support for a new piece of Microsoft hardware – the HoloLens – Microsoft's first foray into augmenting reality with holograms.
The HoloLens headset includes its own CPU and GPU, along with a third, "holographic" processor. The device has transparent eyepieces onto which can be displayed hologram …

America's top rock hounds are gathering in Virginia to decide where on Mars they want NASA's next rover to land – not just so it can survey the Red Planet but also so that it can send back useful samples.
NASA has already announced that it will send a newish rover to Mars in 2020. The probe will use the same body shell as the …

Russian boffins have floated the idea that the Tunguska object, a meteorite that flattened swathes of Siberia in 1908, may have been a chunk of Mars.
The Tunguska event is considered history's largest recorded meteorite impact. Controversy surrounds whether the object was a meteorite or comet, and whether the object hit the …

NASA has decided the mystery shiny object on Mars merits another day of probing, but is fairly sure it is a piece of plastic from the Curiosity rover.
The space agency's explanation for the object says:
The rover team's assessment is that the bright object is something from the rover, not Martian material. It appears to be a …

Security outlet VUPEN has revealed it held onto a critical Internet Explorer vulnerability for three years before disclosing it at the March Pwn2Own hacker competition.
The company wrote in a disclosure last week it discovered the vulnerability (CVE-2014-2777) on 12 February 2011 which was patched by Microsoft on 17 June (MS14- …

NASA has published a long and detailed explanation of just how its Curiosity rover managed to take a self-portrait.
The agency has posted a video, which we've popped at the bottom of the story, and lengthy text explanations of the way it assembled the shot below.
NASA says “Curiosity held the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager ( …

Mean time between failure wonks take note: The Opportunity rover launched in 2003 and expected to survive 90 days on Mars today racks up nine years of continuous operations on the red planet. That's 3195 days longer than first planned.
Opportunity was hauled into orbit by a Delta II rocket on July 7th, 2003. A little over six …

A group of researchers have found evidence of large granite deposits on the surface of Mars, an indication that the Red Planet may be more volcanically active than originally believed.
The research group from the Georgia Institute of Technology said that it has found evidence of volcanic feldspar on the martian surface, an …

Calm down, Mars fanatics. NASA has tossed a wet blanket over speculation that its Curiosity rover has found evidence of life – or, at minimum, of organic compounds – on the Red Planet.
"Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect," the agency plainly stated in a …

New vid
It's T-40 days unti NASA's nuclear powered Curiosity rover arrives at Mars and commences re-entry and descent to the surface beneath its hover-rocket sky crane lander - and the space mission's engineers are biting their nails.
It's not the first time the space agency has talked about "seven minutes of terror". Pretty much any …

It appears the Curiosity rover on Mars has had some exciting news, but NASA controllers have said that they're keeping quiet about it until the facts have been checked.
"This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good," John Grotzinger, principal investigator for Curiosity told NPR.
According to …

The Curiosity rover kept trundling away over the weekend, with NASA reporting the vehicle has now moved 142 meters.
More exciting Martian action over the weekend took place at a spot NASA calls “an outcrop called Kirkwood in the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater.” Ye Olde Opportunity rover is still hard at …

45 years ago today - that is, July 20th - the human race left its first bootprint on a body other than the Earth we'd been treading for the last few million years, as Neil Armstrong stepped off the Eagle lunar module's ladder and onto the dusty regolith of the Moon.
"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind …

All the boffinry world is alive with speculation as to just what the as yet unnannounced "one for the history books" discovered by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity might be. But a recently-published study may offer a clue.
In the investigation, researchers from NASA's Johnson Space Center, the Carnegie Institution and the Lunar and …

NASA has released an app that allows would-be rocket scientists get up close and personal with the agency's spacecraft.
NASA's Spacecraft 3D app
Spacecraft 3D, made at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL), uses augmented reality animation to show how the spacecraft moves and to allow users to move its outer components.
The app, …

While the Curiosity rover faffs about sending its earthbound doppelganger to help President Obama be inaugurated afresh, NASA's harder-working Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has spotted something interesting at the bottom of a crater, namely clays and other rocks associated with terrestrial lakes and perhaps, just perhaps, …

Updated
NASA's Mars probe MAVEN has successfully sneaked through its weather window and launched from Cape Canaveral at 13.28pm ET on Monday, before heavy weather could roll in and delay the launch.
MAVEN launch And she's off
Scientists and engineers at the agency and Lockheed Martin have spent the last five years building the Mars …

Fresh from the ongoing success of the Curiosity rover, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has awarded funding for its next Mars mission, InSight, which will drill down under the Martian surface to try and understand its geology.
InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will be a fixed …

NASA's real-world space program may be mired in funding disputes, but that won't stop American toy company Mattel's iconic fashion doll Barbie from taking to the stars once more, with a new "Barbie I Can Be ... Mars Explorer" edition.
The doll, a collaboration between Mattel and NASA, was released to coincide with the one-year …

NASA is firing up a new camera on the Curiosity rover, offering the first color pictures of the landing site, while another pass by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has given a more detailed look at the landing area and its debris on the Martian surface.
The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) has been undocked from its housing …

Unlike the broken-down Russian Mars probe Phobos-Grunt, the NASA Mars Science Laboratory is on track for touching down on the Red Planet after smoothly pulling off some well-choreographed thrusts.
In its biggest manoeuvre yet, the floating nuclear science tank - which is carrying shiny new rover Curiosity - fired up to eight …

A team of British and Canadian scientists think they've found the oldest water sealed off from the Earth's atmosphere hidden deep in the Earth's crust, and estimate it is between 1.5 and 2.67 billion years old.
Old Water How long before Perrier tries to flog this?
The researchers analyzed water welling up from boreholes …

The launch of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), which contains the Curiosity rover, has been delayed by a day to November 26.
NASA said today that it was taking the extra time to allow the team to remove and replace a flight termination system battery.
Liftoff will now take place sometime during the one hour and 43 minute …

NASA has announced that its Mars Science Laboratory, aka Curiosity, will touch down in Mars' Gale crater, described as boffins' "top choice to pursue the ambitious goals of this new rover mission".
Gale crater is a depression 96 miles (154km) in diameter – covering "about the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island" – …

Pic
A Martian meteorite nicknamed Black Beauty contains more water than any other rock found from the Red Planet.
Martian meteorite Black Beauty Martian meteorite Black Beauty Credit: NASA
The space stone, discovered in Morocco, is believed to come from the Martian crust 2.1 billion years ago, during the planet’s Amazonian era. …

The original Unix desktop, the Common Desktop Environment or CDE, is back. Seven years after Sun replaced it with GNOME on Solaris, the Open Group's Common Desktop Environment has returned, now fully open-source and with a modern Linux port.
CDE was developed about 20 years ago as a unified desktop environment for all the …

NASA, and plenty of private individuals, want to put mankind on Mars. Now a team at the University of Washington, with funding from the space agency, is about to start building a fusion engine that could get humans there in just 30 days and make other forms of space travel obsolete.
FDR Fusion drive Rocket fuel is just so last …

NASA Mars Science Laboratory is buttoned up into its fairing atop its Atlas booster, ready for liftoff on November 25 with touchdown scheduled for August of next year – a reentry and landing that will have NASA space boffins biting their nails.
"Any entry, descent, and landing on Mars is a place where you take pause and bite …

In a year dominated by Martian news, the pioneering Earthling spirit of one Elon Musk and the hunt for a second human home also grabbed some cosmic headlines.
Mars Science Laboratory - Curiosity rover and skycrane
The year started with Curiosity's journey to the Red Planet, dodging solar flares as it thrust its way towards …

The Reg storage desk has learned of a Mars project at NetApp. So we've sent our own Curiosity rover - specifically, a Google bot - to scan for job descriptions. This is what it transmitted back:
Mars is an industry-leading next-generation product and one of the most strategic projects within NetApp.
Mars is a clusterable and …

Feature
What did you want to be when you grew up? Chances are as a follower of Dr Who, you wanted to be a Time lord.
While travel in time sadly isn’t on the cards, space travel is becoming a reality with Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo working through 50-plus rocket-powered test flights to qualify for passenger flights and with the Space …

Downloading pirated material in Japan can now earn you two years in prison and a fine of two million yen ($25,600) for each purloined file, with uploaders facing 10 years in the Big House and a fine five times as large.
The laws – some of the toughest ever enacted against illegal downloaders – were passed in June after strong …

Comment
How disappointing. Felix Baumgartner, the steely-sphered Austrian who recently supplied us all with much quality entertainment by leaping out of a balloon 128,000 feet above New Mexico to break the all-time world altitude skydiving record, turns out to be a blinkered fool.
In an interview with the Telegraph last week which has …

NASA is making many a child's dream come true by letting the public take a trip through the solar system – and you don't even have to leave your living room.
Eyes on the Solar System NASA's new site: Eyes on the Solar System.
The space administration is putting actual mission data on an interactive website, Eyes on the Solar …

It's Not Rocket Science
I hate to say it, but most of what you think about space-age technology is a total fabrication. It’s the stuff of sci-fi.
Perhaps the biggest misconception of all is that spacecraft are equipped with cutting-edge computing platforms that any self-respecting technophile would commit unspeakable acts to get their mitts on. …

If life ever existed on Mars, it's likely that its longest-lasting enclaves would be underground.
"If surface habitats were short-term, that doesn't mean we should be glum about prospects for life on Mars," says Bethany Ehlmann, the lead author of a new NASA report on the Red Planet, "but it says something about what type of …

The past year provided us with some wonderful tales of innovation and expertise, but we all like to see a car crash as much as success story, right? So here's a roundup of the most colossal cock-ups of the last 12 months, including face-plants by Google, Facebook, Apple, and others who succumbed to that most universal of human …

How much do you remember about what really mattered in 2012? You're about to find out.
Last year The Reg chronicled more than just the birth of Windows 8, the rise of ARM, the battle between iOS and Android, the genesis of the buzzword de l'année "big data", Apple's crap Maps app flap, and other communiqués from the front lines …

It's all go this week in the field of tiny, spherical robots that float inside the International Space Station (ISS) on their own independent orbits about the Earth.
Not only are the Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellite (SPHERES) units to be upgraded by DARPA with various radical new …

Part Two
As mobile sales and connections continued to soar and break records, just how much your phone knows about you and who can see that information were big subjects in 2011.
The long-smouldering issue in the UK of newspaper journos paying private investigators to break into mobile voicemail inboxes in search of scoops finally …