Brainiacs have today revealed how they rejigged instruments aboard NASA’s Martian rover Curiosity to measure changes in the Red Planet's gravity over its surface. "Curiosity, essentially, has a new science instrument, six and a half years into its mission," said Kevin Lewis, lead author of a published paper describing the …

PicsAfter an extensive summer of long, long, long-distance remote support by NASA engineers on Earth, it looks as though Curiosity on Mars is back in the drilling game. At the end of 2016, the rover's drill bit, which it has used more than a dozen times to explore the bedrock of the Red Planet, started playing up. The problem was …

Data from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars has left scientists scratching their heads. On the one hand, the bot appears to have found evidence that water once flowed on Mars, but on the other hand, the readings suggest there couldn't have been. The problem stems from carbon dioxide, or rather the lack of it. Curiosity has been …

Computer scientists in Germany hope to make humanoid robots smarter by programming the 'droids with a sense of “artificial curiosity.” The bots gain their inquisitiveness from an algorithm dubbed Curious Dr MISFA, which is described in this paper [PDF] that appeared on arXiv this month. The software uses unsupervised and …

PicThe Curiosity rover has discovered what appears to be a partially melted meteorite and has been testing it out with its on-board laser. The golf ball-sized nugget, dubbed Egg Rock, was spotted on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp in an area called the Murray formation, a dried-out lake bed on the Red Planet. After the control …

Mars' atmosphere is wafting up from its cold, dead soil, according to new findings from the Curiosity Rover. A new paper titled In situ measurement of atmospheric krypton and xenon on Mars with Mars Science Laboratory explains that this story starts with the Viking landers, which recorded “krypton and xenon detections and …

A chemical camera sitting atop Curiosity, the Mars rover, has spotted signs that the Red Planet may have once had oxygen in its atmosphere, fuelling further speculation that it was once Earth-like. Today, Mars is a barren wasteland. Its surface is dry and caked in rust-coloured iron oxide dust particles – a stark difference …

NASA boffins have crunched 34 million weather observations collected by the Curiosity rover its two full Martian years trundling about the red planet. The basics are pretty simple: Mars is reliably cold, dry and windy, while the thin atmosphere means not much heat is retained so air temperature “usually plummets by more than …

NASA's Curiosity rover has delivered a fine panoramic postcard of a Martian sand dune, snapped as the trundling explorer ascends the Red Planet's Mount Sharp. A distant Mount Sharp rises above the Namib Dune. Pic: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS (big version here) The four-metre-high "Namib Dune" forms part of the Bagnold Dunes, …

The Curiosity Rover has found the wettest patch of ground it's yet observed on Mars. The nuclear-powered laser-packing space tank has spent the last week or so in the "Marias Pass" region where it unleashed its drill to turn parts of a rock named “Buckskin” to powder. That powder's since been subjected to analysis by …

PicsYet again citizen observers have spotted something odd on Mars – this time what appears to be a woman in a long flowing gown standing on a cliff face. The truth is out there; or maybe not "It looks like a woman partly cloaked. The woman seems to have breasts... indicated by the shadow on its chest," reports hard-hitting …

NASA's nuclear-powered Curiosity rover has aimed its ChemCam laser at some unusually light-coloured rocks on Mars and discovered surprising similarities between them and the rocks of Earth's granitic continental crust. The evidence of a "continental crust" on Mars is a huge discovery from the space-tank, now rumbling over the …

The Curiosity rover's arm is working again! In late February, NASA shut down the robotic limb after a short circuit led to errors. By March 7th, the space agency expressed optimism that the arm would come good. And last week, it did: NASA reports that last Wednesday the nuclear-powered laser-equipped space tank once again …

NASA boffins are confident that its Mars-dwelling space tank Curiosity will return to full duty as early as next week, after its mission was temporarily scuppered by a short-circuiting arm. The U.S. space agency said yesterday that it was continuing to analyse what had gone wrong with the rover's arm movements. As The …

Humanity's Mars-resident nuclear-powered, laser-packing space tank Curiosity has a broken arm. NASA boffins said the problem emerged on 27 February when "the rover was conducting an early step in the transfer of rock powder collected by the drill on the arm to laboratory instruments inside the rover." During that operation " …

NASA boffins are planning to pulverise a dried-up deposit from the surface of Mars and then snort up and "ingest" the resulting crystalline dust before performing a major software update, they have announced. The crystal snorting will of course be done by robotic means, through the agency of the nuclear powered, raygun-armed, …

PicsPhotographs of rocks taken by NASA's Curiosity rover may confirm that life as we know it once existed on Mars. The pictures were shot at the Gillespie Lake outcrop in Yellowknife Bay, which used to be a huge lake back when Mars had surface water. Dr Nora Noffke, who has spent 20 years studying fossils of early microbes, said …

Two new papers on the latest data from the compact chemistry laboratory aboard nuclear-tank Curiosity show organic compounds in Mars' atmosphere and rocks – and therefore offer tantalizing clues to the Red Planet's watery past. Youtube Video In the past 20 months Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory has …