Latest Malin Space Science Systems Stories
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online NASA’s Curiosity rover has become the first robot ever to drill into bedrock and collect a sample on Mars, using a drill located at the end of its mechanical arm to bore a hole into fine-grained sediment, then collecting material from the interior for future analysis, the US space agency announced on Friday. According to NASA officials, Curiosity drilled a hole that is approximately 0.63 inch wide and 2.5 inches deep in a rock...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA's newest Martian rover has snapped a nocturnal image of a rock on the Red Planet for the first time. Mars Science Lab's Curiosity used its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera attached to its arm to take photos at night, illuminated by white lights and ultraviolet lights on the instrument. Scientists used MAHLI to take a close-up nighttime look at a rock target known as "Sayunei," in an area called "Yellowknife Bay" where...
[ Video 1 ] | Video 2 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA has finally opened up its tightly sealed lips and said that its Curiosity rover has found evidence of simple organic compounds on Mars. NASA announced at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco today that its Mars Curiosity rover has completed its first analysis of Martian soil, finding a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. The space agency said its Curiosity rover has found...
NASA/JPL Report A Martian dust storm that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been tracking since last week has also produced atmospheric changes detectable by rovers on Mars. Using the orbiter's Mars Color Imager, Bruce Cantor of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, began observing the storm on Nov. 10, and subsequently reported it to the team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The storm came no closer than about 837 miles (1,347 kilometers) from Opportunity,...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Over the weekend, NASA's Curiosity rover went through some activities designed to check and characterize precision movements by the rover's robot arm. The activities help to confirm that the rover's tools and robotic arm have good health, and its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) is useful. MAHLI took an image with its reclosable dust cover open for the first time during the activity, confirming sharp imaging capability had been...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online What could one day be considered artifacts if archaeologists are to ever start digging around on Mars, a new high resolution photo shows the remnants of Curiosity's landing components. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured an image using its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera of the equipment that helped get Mars' newest citizen down to the ground. During Curiosity's "seven minutes of terror," it shed a...
In England it is known as the "Plough," in Germany the "Great Cart," and in Malaysia the "Seven Ploughs." Since humanity first turned its eyes skyward, the seven northern hemisphere stars that compose the "Big Dipper" have been a welcome and familiar introduction to the heavens. "I can recall as a kid making an imaginary line from the two stars that make up the right side of the Big Dipper's bowl and extending it upward to find the North Star," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of...
Mars Science Laboratory mission will send its one-ton rover, Curiosity, to Mount Sharp, a martian mountain inside a crater. Once there, NASA researchers hope to learn more about the mountain, how it formed, and hopefully learn more about the history and geology of Mars. Larger than any Rocky Mountain found in the Centennial State, Mount Sharp has been a subject of interest ever since it was discovered in the 1970s. It sits in a peculiar place; in the middle of a crater, and NASA...
PROVIDENCE, R.I., Feb. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Spectra Systems Corporation, a technology company that provides banknote security features to many of the world's central banks, has one of its products on the way to Mars as part of the NASA Curiosity rover mission. Spectra Systems' materials are playing a key role in calibrating one of the high performance camera systems on the Curiosity rover called MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager). The mission that launched on Nov. 26, 2011 is part of...
The camera at the end of the robotic arm on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has its own calibration target, a smartphone-size plaque that looks like an eye chart supplemented with color chips and an attached penny. When Curiosity lands on Mars in August, researchers will use this calibration target to test performance of the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. MAHLI's close-up inspections of Martian rocks and soil will show details so tiny, the calibration target includes reference lines...
