Rover

Meet GROVER the Rover, Set For Greenland Exploration

May 7, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter How fast is Greenland’s ice sheet melting in response to climate change, and how is it recovering? A new NASA rover with the friendly name of GROVER (Greeland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research) is going to [...]

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Curiosity Once Again in Safe Mode – If Only Briefly

March 19, 2013

Not even two and a half weeks after a memory glitch that sent NASA’s Curiosity rover into a safe mode on Feb. 27, the robotic Mars explorer once again went into standby status as the result of a software discrepancy — although mission engineers diagnosed the new problem quickly and anticipate having the rover out [...]

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First Color Image of Curiosity’s Tracks from Orbit

January 31, 2013

HiRISE image of Curiosity’s tracks, landing zone and the MSL rover at John Klein outcrop (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona) As Curiosity prepares for the historic first drilling operation on Mars, the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured an image of it from 271 km (169 miles) up, along with twin lines of tracks and [...]

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NASA Reveals Plans for New Mars Rover

December 4, 2012

Sequels are all the rage these days… even for NASA, apparently. At the American Geophysical Union 2012 convention in San Francisco today, NASA’s associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld revealed the agency’s plans for another Mars mission. Slated to land in 2020, it will be a rover based on the same design as Mars Science [...]

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Curiosity’s Laser Leaves Its Mark

August 30, 2012

Before-and-after images from Curiosity’s ChemCam  micro-imager show holes left by its million-watt laser (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/LPGN/CNRS) PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW! Curiosity’s head-mounted ChemCam did a little target practice on August 25, blasting millimeter-sized holes in a soil sample named “Beechey” in order to acquire spectrographic data from the resulting plasma glow. The neat line of holes is called a five-by-one [...]

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