* Panoramic view shows rust-colored surface strewn with gravel

* First 'self-portrait' reveals pebbles kicked up on top of craft

* NASA engineers prepare vehicle for four-day software upgrade

PASADENA, Calif., Aug 9 (Reuters) - The science rover Curiosity took a break from instrument checks on its third full day on Mars to beam back more pictures from the Red Planet, including its first self-portrait and a 360-degree color view of its home in Gale Crater, NASA said on Thursday.

The panoramic mosaic, comprising 130 separate images that Curiosity captured with its newly activated navigation cameras, shows a rust-colored, pebble-strewn expanse stretching to a wall of the crater's rim in one direction and a tall mound of layered rock in another.

That formation, named Mount Sharp, stands at the center of the vast, ancient impact crater and several miles from where Curiosity touched down at the end of an eight-month voyage across 352 million mile (566 million km) of space.

The layers of exposed rock are thought to hold a wealth of Mars' geologic history, making it the main target of exploration for scientists who will use the rover to seek evidence of whether the planet most similar to Earth might now harbor or once have hosted key ingredients for microbial life.

But mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles are exercising caution immediately following Curiosity's jarring, death-defying descent to the surface on Sunday night.

They plan to spend weeks putting the nuclear-powered, six-wheeled rover and its sophisticated array of instruments through a painstaking series of "health" checks before embarking on the thrust of their science mission in earnest.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity project, formally named the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA's first astrobiology mission since the Viking probes of the 1970s and is touted as the first fully equipped mobile geochemistry lab ever sent to a distant world.

EQUIPMENT CHECKUPS

After three full days on the Red Planet, "Curiosity continues to behave flawlessly" and has "executed all planned activities" without a hitch, mission manager Michael Watkins said at a JPL news briefing.

The latest round of equipment checks included an instrument designed to determine mineral composition of powdered rock and soil samples; one to analyze soil and atmospheric samples for organic compounds; one to detect traces of water locked in shallow mineral deposits; and another that uses particle X-rays to identify chemical elements in rocks and soils.

The very delivery of Curiosity to the surface of Mars already has been hailed by NASA as the greatest feat of robotic spaceflight.

The car-sized rover, which flew from Earth encased in a protective capsule, blasted into the Martian sky at hypersonic speed and landed safely seven minutes later after an elaborate, daredevil descent combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether.

Since then, the rover has been sending a string of early images back to Earth, relayed by two NASA satellites orbiting Mars, providing glimpses of a terrain that scientists say appear reminiscent of the Mojave Desert in Southern California.

One shot beamed back late Wednesday night, the first taken by Curiosity of itself, shows the rover's top deck strewn with dark pebbles apparently kicked up from the ground when the craft landed. NASA scientists said the gravel does not appear to pose any risk to instruments on the vehicle.

Two separate high-resolution "Navcam" images taken of the surface show that thrust from the sky-crane rockets during descent carved out a 1.5-foot (0.5-meter) trench in the surface, exposing what appears to be Martian bedrock underneath.

When Curiosity wakes up for its fourth day on Mars, early Friday California time, mission controllers plan to conduct additional instrument checks and prepare the craft for an upgrade of its main computer software for surface operations. All other activities will be suspended during that upgrade, which will begin on day 5 of the mission and last four days. (Reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Anthony Boadle)

View the original article here

* Prototype NASA landing vehicle goes up in smoke

* Engineers still looking into cause of fiery accident

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug 9 (Reuters) - A small NASA lander being tested for missions to the moon and other destinations beyond Earth crashed and burned after veering off course during a trial run at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, officials with the U.S. space agency said.

There were no injuries after the prototype, known as Morpheus, burst into flames near the runway formerly used by NASA's space shuttles.

The insect-like vehicle, designed and built by engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, had made several flights attached to a crane before Thursday's attempted free-flight.

Morpheus' engines, which burn liquid oxygen and methane, appeared to ignite as planned, lifting the 1,750-pound (794 kg) vehicle into the air. But a few seconds later, Morpheus rolled over on its side and plummeted to the ground.

NASA video showed the vehicle engulfed in flames and then rocked by a spectacular explosion, presumably due to the fuel tanks rupturing.

“"Failures such as these were anticipated prior to the test, and are part of the development process for any complex spaceflight hardware," NASA said in a statement.

An investigation is under way, the statement added.

Project Morpheus began in partnership with privately owned Armadillo Aerospace, which is developing re-usable, suborbital vehicles that take off and land vertically.

NASA, which has spent about $7 million on the project over the past 2-1/2 years, is interested in developing technologies that could be used to fly cargo to the moon and other future missions beyond Earth orbit.

Project Morpheus was an example of what the former project manager called "“Home Depot engineering" - low-budget projects that use existing resources and partner with non-traditional aerospace companies.

“"The Morpheus lander is kind of our poster child. It's one of our first attempts to do these kinds of projects," former project manager Matt Ondler said in an interview with Reuters last year.

“"Instead of building some elaborate test structure, you go to Home Depot and build something very quickly that gets you 80 percent of the answer and allows you to keep moving forward," he said.

Morpheus arrived at Florida's seaside space center in July for three months of increasingly rigorous test flights, including automated landings in a mock moonscape, complete with craters and boulders.

The lander was designed to deliver about 1,100 pounds (500 kg) of cargo to the moon, NASA said on its Project Morpheus website.

Technologies being developed include a propulsion system that uses liquid oxygen and methane -- green fuels that could be manufactured on other planetary bodies, NASA said.

The accident happened as NASA scientists were still hailing the Mars rover Curiosity's descent and landing on the Red Planet earlier this week as a "“miracle of engineering."

View the original article here

An engineering model of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is seen from the rear in a sandy, Mars-like environment named the Mars Yard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California July 25, 2012.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Sun Jul 29, 2012 5:13pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Mars rover was on its final approach to the red planet on Sunday, heading toward a mountain that may hold clues about whether life has ever existed on Mars, officials said.

The rover, also known as Curiosity, has been careening toward Mars since its launch in November. The nuclear-powered rover the size of a compact car is expected to end its 352-million-mile (567-million-km) journey on August 6 at 1:31 a.m. EDT.

The landing zone is a 12-mile-by-4-mile (20-km-by-7-km) area inside an ancient impact basin known as Gale Crater, located near the planet's equator. The crater, one of the lowest places on Mars, has a 3-mile-high (5-km-high) mountain of what appears to be layers of sediment.

Scientists suspect the crater may have once been the floor of a lake.

If so, they believe that sediments likely filled the crater, but were carried away over time, leaving only the central mound.

Readying to travel the last stretch to its landing site, Curiosity fired its steering thrusters for six seconds early Sunday, tweaking its flight path by 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per second.

"I will not be surprised if this was our last trajectory correction maneuver," chief navigator Tomas Martin-Mur, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

Curiosity is expected to hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at 1:24 a.m. EDT on August 6. If all goes as planned, seven minutes later the rover will be standing on its six wheels on the dry, dusty surface of Mars.

Landing is by no means guaranteed. To transport the one-ton rover and position it near the mound, engineers devised a complicated system that includes a 52-foot (16-metre) diameter supersonic parachute, a rocket-powered aerial platform and a so-called "sky crane" designed to lower the rover on a tether to the ground.

NASA last week successfully repositioned its Mars-orbiting Odyssey spacecraft so that it would be able to monitor Curiosity's descent and landing and radio the information back to ground controllers in as close to real time as possible.

Earth and Mars are so far apart that radio signals, which travel at the speed of light, take 13.8 minutes for a one-way journey.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Mohammad Zargham)

View the original article here

LONDON | Sun Aug 5, 2012 5:39am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - The delicate threads that hold modern life together are dramatically cut by an unexpected threat from outer space, with disastrous effects.

It's the stuff of science fiction usually associated with tales of rogue asteroids on a collision course with earth.

But over the next two years, as the sun reaches a peak in its 10-year activity cycle, scientists say there is a heightened risk that a whopping solar storm could knock out the power grids, satellites and communications on which we all rely.

"Governments are taking it very seriously," says Mike Hapgood, a space weather specialist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. "These things may be very rare but when they happen, the consequences can be catastrophic."

Hapgood said that solar storms are increasingly being put on the national risk registers used for disaster planning, alongside other rare but devastating events like tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

The statistics support this, he said. There is a roughly 12 percent chance of a major solar storm every decade, making them a one-in-a-hundred-year event. The last major one was over 150 years ago.

SECRETIVE SATELLITE INDUSTRY

The threat comes from the magnetically-charged plasma which the sun belches out in so-called coronal mass ejections. Like vast bubbles bursting off the sun's surface, they send millions of tonnes of gas racing through space that can engulf the earth with as little as one to three days warning.

The geomagnetic storms they stoke can induce strong currents in national power grids that literally melt the expensive transformers that form the cornerstones of the system.

The failure of a large part of India's fragile power grid this week was not related to geomagnetic storms but it does give a taste of the chaos that can ensue. Trapped miners, stranded trains and hospitals plunged into darkness, and this is a country where up to 40 percent of the population is not connected to the national grid.

Scientists say satellites can also be damaged or destroyed, as charged particles rip through them at hundreds of miles per second. It's an issue the satellite industry is not keen to talk openly about.

"A few will still publicly deny that there is a problem," said Hapgood, blaming the fear that being first to admit the problem could put a company at a commercial disadvantage.

"We have a way to go before we reach the point where the market accepts that this is a universal problem and gives the advantage to the guys who make a virtue of their ability to deal with space weather."

Radio communications with jetliners can also be knocked out as the solar storm messes with the ionosphere, the region of the earth's upper atmosphere through which long-range radio waves travel.

When there is a threat, airlines re-route planes to lower latitudes where they are less exposed. It's not quite routine but it isn't that rare either, and it adds to the fuel bill.

CHEER UP, IT MIGHT NEVER HAPPEN

It's a threat that is 'low frequency, high severity' in insurance industry jargon, which governments have only recently started taking seriously.

"Politically, it started to get some purchase about three years ago," says Andrew Richards, a severe risk analyst at National Grid, which runs the UK electricity network. "We know they are real effects but we are nowhere near there, in terms of our understanding."

Teams of scientists in North America and Europe spend their days and nights monitoring the sun and issuing warnings to governments, power companies, satellite operators and airlines.

But exactly how much to worry is unclear because proper scientific understanding about space weather is based on incidents and work done only in the last 20 to 30 years, the blink of an eye in solar terms.

In 2003, a magnetic storm triggered malfunctions in 47 satellites and led to the complete loss of one worth $640 million, according to the British Antarctic Survey, which this year launched an EU-funded space weather forecasting service for the satellite industry.

Before that, a 1989 storm was blamed for taking out the entire power network in Quebec, Canada, within 90 seconds that left millions of people without electricity for nine hours.

But the only really big storms that provide any meaningful reference point for how bad it could be, happened long before the development of nationwide power grids, the internet and mass air travel.

In 1921, a magnetic storm was blamed for putting the New York Central Railroad out of action and disrupting telegraph and telephone networks across Europe.

But the big one is known as the Carrington event in 1859, when British astronomer Richard Carrington observed and recorded a very large solar eruption that reportedly took just 17 hours to show up in the earth's atmosphere. The aurora borealis - or North Lights - were seen as far south as the Caribbean.

Local news reports carried accounts of people in the northeast United States being able to read a newspaper in the middle of the night by the light of the aurora, and miners in the Rocky Mountains waking up and preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.

The accounts are entertaining, but with about a thousand active satellites now in orbit around the earth, including the International Space Station, the damage from solar storms could present private operators like SES Global and governments with a bill in the billions of dollars.

NO RETURN TO THE STONEAGE

It is hard to quantify how serious and pervasive a sudden and complete loss of electrical power could be for a modern economy, but this is precisely what a 2008 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences tried to do. The result was alarming.

The effects of an extended outage lasting more than a few hours would include, it said, "disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure, and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration."

A separate NASA-backed report in 2007 estimated a Carrington-scale solar storm would cost the satellite operators a minimum of $30 billion.

That's without the loss of revenues to the telecoms and broadcasting companies that rely on them and the hole it could leave in military security networks.

Andrew Richards said National Grid started commissioning research on the threat around 1996 and the company now monitors solar activity on a daily basis.

"We want to be prepared if something did happen," he said. "There is a human tendency that if it hasn't happened for a long time, to forget all about it."

That rarity makes the risk hard to quantify. "It's very hard to say how bad it could possibly be," he says. "The sun could explode and we would all die, but modeling based on the most extreme events that we know of says we do not believe a catastrophic return to the stone age is on the cards."

WATCHING AND WAITING

Based on that modeling, Richards says the worst-case scenario is that the voltage fluctuations get bad enough to cause a local or national blackout.

To guard against this, National Grid has opted for a more resilient transformer design since 1997 and has increased the number of spares it keeps.

This is no small task. The transformers have a 30-year lifespan, cost 2 to 3 million pounds each and there are 1,500 of them in Britain alone. They are made by just a few global engineering groups, companies like Siemens and General Electric.

They run hot under normal circumstances but when a geomagnetic storm triggers an extreme voltage fluctuation the oil that insulates them can start to boil.

Richards said the record for replacing one of them is four weeks. "Imagine demolishing a family house, re-laying the foundations and then closing roads and bringing in a ready-made one on the back of a lorry. You can't do it overnight."

If the scientists raised the alarm, Richards and his sun-watchers would have a few days to get as many of the network's transformers into action as possible in order to spread the electrical load as thinly as possible when the storm hits.

Other than that, he said, "it would give us five or six days to sit and think, and worry about what might happen."

Aside from earth-based observation of the sun, one of the few detectors monitoring the 'solar wind' is NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer, which sits like a lonely sentinel about 1.5 million miles away in an orbit that keeps it directly between the earth and the sun.

Its detectors continually monitor the direction and speed of the solar wind, feeding data back to the Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder, Colorado, to give 15 to 45 minutes warning of any solar onslaught.

The insurance industry, which would take a hit, if satellites started dropping out of the sky, admits that the risk is a hard one to price.

Ludovic Amoux is a specialist underwriter at the world's leading space insurer, Paris-based SpaceCo, which is owned by Allianz.

"We have tried to analyze the probability... Our only concern is that although the probability is low, the impact would be huge," he said.

(Additional reporting by Myles Neligan; Editing by Anna Willard)

View the original article here

1 of 18. Michael Meyer (L), lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, and John Grotzinger, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist, California Institute of Technology look on during a news conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calfiornia August 2, 2012. A graphic of the MSL Curiousity rover and the cameras on board is seen in the background. The rover is set to land in the late evening of August 5, 2012.

PASADENA, California | Thu Aug 2, 2012 7:51pm EDT

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was about a week away from wrapping up an 11-month journey to the Red Planet in 1999 when engineers noticed a problem - the spacecraft, designed to study Mars' environment, was not where it was supposed to be.

The gap grew alarmingly over the next few days. On September 23, Climate Orbiter began the brake to enter Mars' orbit as planned, but disappeared behind the planet 49 seconds early, severing radio contact with Earth. It was never heard from again.

Launching probes to Mars is not for the faint of heart. Out of the 40 spacecraft dispatched to the Red Planet, only 14 lived to fulfill their missions.

Against those grim odds, NASA is poised for its most unorthodox and risky landing yet. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory is scheduled to touch down at 1:31 a.m. EDT Monday (0431 GMT) next to a mountain that may harbor life-friendly environments.

"This is the hardest NASA robotic mission ever attempted," NASA's associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld told reporters during a pre-landing news conference last month.

To deliver the one-ton robotic geologist near the mountain's base, engineers designed a contraption that would make cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg beam. The rover, about the size of a Mini Cooper car, is too heavy to bounce to the planet's surface in airbags or fly itself with rocket thrusters, systems successfully used by six previous NASA landers.

Instead, Mars Science Lab will be lowered to the ground on a tether spooled out by a flying platform that works like an aerial crane. NASA is the first to admit the idea sounds crazy, but managers are convinced it will work.

"We've done everything we could. We've tested everything we could test. We built everything to the best of our ability," said Doug McCuistion, who oversees NASA's Mars exploration programs. "Once you understand it, it's not a crazy concept."

History is not on NASA's side, though the United States has fared far better than Russia when it comes to Mars exploration. Out of 19 attempted missions, Russia and the former Soviet Union have had only a few partial successes.

Launch failures claimed nearly half of Russia's probes, including the ambitious Phobos-Grunt sample return mission last year. Other spacecraft sailed blindly past Mars or burned up in the planet's atmosphere during landing attempts.

Newcomers Japan and China have fared no better. Only Europe, which operates the Mars Express orbiter, has had beginner's luck on Mars.

"We learn from these things even if they aren't successful," McCuistion said.

Investigators have attributed the failed 1999 Climate Orbiter mission to human error: The flight software used metric units while the ground system that wrote the code used Imperial measures.

Two months later, a companion lander bit the dust - literally - when its rocket engines apparently shut down too early, causing the probe to crash to the ground.

And even when the engineering is perfect, Mars itself can throw mean curve balls. NASA's Mariner 9 and two Soviet orbiters arrived in May 1971 to find a global-wide dust storm in progress.

"We don't have the capability to predict these things," McCuistion said. "That is why Mars wins an awful lot of the time."

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Jackie Frank)

View the original article here

This artist's concept depicts the rover Curiosity, of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, as it uses its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to investigate the composition of a rock surface.

PASADENA, California | Sun Aug 5, 2012 4:28pm EDT

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - NASA plans to follow up a decade-long search for Mars' lost water with a mission to learn whether the Red Planet once harbored other ingredients necessary for life.

The astrobiological hunt begins once the $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab rover Curiosity lands itself beside a towering mountain that rises from the floor of a vast, ancient impact basin called Gale Crater.

Touchdown, monitored from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is scheduled for 10:31 p.m. Sunday Pacific time (1:31 a.m. EDT on Monday).

"It's a big science goal. We're not just looking for water anymore," said California Institute of Technology geologist John Grotzinger, the lead mission scientist.

"The expectations go up. The scientific challenge is much greater. It's just going to be harder to address this question of habitability," he told Reuters.

Scientists considered hundreds of landing sites before choosing Gale Crater, which probably formed when an asteroid or comet crashed into the planet some 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago.

From high-resolution images taken by orbiting satellites, Gale Crater's central mound, known as Mount Sharp, appears to consist of layers of sediment rising like a stack of cards 3 miles into the sky, taller than the crater's rim.

The most likely origin of the mountain is that it formed from the remains of whatever material filled up the basin long ago. How it was left standing in the middle of Gale Crater, a 96-mile-(154-km)wide bowl located near the planet's equator, is a mystery, one of many scientists hope to answer during Curiosity's two-year science mission.

Regardless of how it formed, scientists consider Mount Sharp a gift of time.

Nothing like it exists on Earth, where plate tectonics, erosion and other natural phenomena constantly reshape the planet's surface.

"We have the opportunity to start in the past, rove up the surface of Mount Sharp and come through time to see how the environments have changed," said Michael Meyer, NASA's Mars exploration program scientist.

WARMER, WETTER MARTIAN PAST

A succession of previous rovers, landers and orbiting spacecraft have gathered compelling evidence that Mars, which is about half the size of Earth and 50 percent farther away from the sun, was not always the dry, acidic, cold desert that appears today.

NASA's strategy since resuming Mars exploration following the 1970s-era Viking missions there has been to look for the chemical and physical fingerprints of water, which is necessary for life - at least as it has evolved on Earth.

The second ingredient in the recipe for life is carbon, which provides organic structure. Carbon will be far more difficult to detect on Mars, if it exists, because the same processes that produce rock tend to destroy organics.

The planet's harsh radiation environment doesn't help either.

"We have a radiation-rich environment on Mars that can destroy organics, so even if it was there, it may be hard to find a place where it's been preserved," Meyer said.

On Earth, the oldest evidence for life dates back about 3.5 billion years. Fossilized remains of single-celled microorganisms were found in 1958 inside a type of rock known as chert. This glass-like rock may exist on Mars as well, and it is not the only material that can preserve organics like a time capsule.

"The challenge for Mars exploration is to first try to identify environments that might have been habitable and then ask, 'Is this the kind of place where organic carbon could have been preserved?'" Grotzinger said.

"With Curiosity, we don't have the ability to look for life, or even fossil life, but we do have the ability to look for organic carbon, so we try to find those environments conducive for preservation. That's the hard part," he said.

The oldest sections of Mount Sharp may overlap the window when life emerged on Earth, a time when Mars is believed to have been warm and wet.

Curiosity's landing site inside Gale Crater is one of the lowest regions on Mars, stacking the odds that water, if it existed there, flowed down to the basin's floor. Mount Sharp may be the remains of this ancient lake bed and perhaps a place that life once called home.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Steve Gorman and Jackie Frank)

View the original article here