NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Inspects new Drill Site - Windjana

The team operating NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is telling the rover to use several tools this weekend to inspect a sandstone slab being evaluated as a possible drilling target.

If this target meets criteria set by engineers and scientists, it could become the mission's third drilled rock, and the first that is not mudstone.

The team calls it "Windjana," after a gorge in Western Australia.

The planned inspection, designed to aid a decision on whether to drill at Windjana, includes observations with the camera and X-ray spectrometer at the end of the rover's arm, use of a brush to remove dust from a patch on the rock, and readings of composition at various points on the rock with an instrument that fires laser shots from the rover's mast.

Curiosity's hammering drill collects powdered sample material from the interior of a rock, and then the rover prepares and delivers portions of the sample to onboard laboratory instruments.

The first two Martian rocks drilled and analyzed this way were mudstone slabs neighboring each other in Yellowknife Bay, about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) northeast of the rover's current location at a waypoint called "the Kimberley."

Those two rocks yielded evidence of an ancient lakebed environment with key chemical elements and a chemical energy source that provided conditions billions of years ago favourable for microbial life.

From planned drilling at Windjana or some nearby location on sandstone at the Kimberley, Curiosity's science team hopes to analyze the cement that holds together the sand-size grains in the rock.

"We want to learn more about the wet process that turned sand deposits into sandstone here," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"What was the composition of the fluids that bound the grains together?

That aqueous chemistry is part of the habitability story we're investigating."

The view is an excerpt from an April 11, 2014, observation by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 

A larger scene from the same observation can be found here.

In the image's enhanced colour, Curiosity itself appears as the bright blue object at the two-o'clock position relative to the butte in the lower center of the scene.

That butte is called "Mount Remarkable" and stands about 16 feet (5 meters) high.

The rover subsequently drove to within its robotic arm's reach of Windjana. For scale, the distance between the parallel wheel tracks visible in the image is about 9 feet (2.7 meters).

U-Cat Robot Turtle: Underwater archaeologists to inspect shipwrecks

The Robot Safari in London Science Museum will see the world premiere of the underwater robot U-CAT, a highly maneuverable robot turtle, designed to penetrate shipwrecks.

U-CAT's locomotion principle is similar to sea turtles. Independently driven four flippers make the robot highly maneuverable; it can swim forward and backward, up and down and turn on spot in all directions.

Maneuverability is a desirable feature when inspecting confined spaces such as shipwrecks. The robot carries an onboard camera and the video footage can be later used to reconstruct the underwater site.

"U-CAT is specifically designed to meet the end-user requirements. Conventional underwater robots use propellers for locomotion. Fin propulsors of U-CAT can drive the robot in all directions without disturbing water and beating up silt from the bottom, which would decrease visibility inside the shipwreck", says Taavi Salumäe, the designer of the U-CAT concept and researcher in Centre for Biorobotics, Tallinn University of Technology.

"The so called biomimetic robots, robots based on animals and plants, is an increasing trend in robotics where we try to overcome the technological bottlenecks by looking at alternative technical solutions provided by nature ", explains Prof. Maarja Kruusmaa, a Head of Centre for Biorobotics.

Credit: Centre for Biorobotics, Tallinn University of Technology

NASA MARS Curiosity Rover: Inspection of Pebbly Rocks at Martian Waypoint

This mosaic of nine images, taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, shows detailed texture in a conglomerate rock bearing small pebbles and sand-size particles.

The rock is at a location called "Darwin," inside Gale Crater.

Exposed outcrop at this location, visible in images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, prompted Curiosity's science team to select it as the mission's first waypoint during the mission's long trek from the "Glenelg" area to Mount Sharp.

MAHLI took the component images shortly before sunset on the 400th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Sept. 21, 2013).

The camera was positioned about 4 inches (10 centimeters) from the rock. Scale is indicated by the Lincoln penny from the MAHLI calibration target, shown beside the mosaic.

Reddish dust coats much of the surface visible in this mosaic, but the patch of rock also offers some bare patches where sand and pebble grains can be seen.

Pebbles here are mostly gray, with some white in them. Some grains are somewhat translucent, and some are shiny.

Researchers interpret the sand and pebbles in the rock as material that was deposited by flowing water, then later buried and cemented into rock.

Curiosity's science team is studying the textures and composition of the conglomerate rock at Darwin to understand its relationship to streambed conglomerate rock found closer to Curiosity's landing site.

A major goal for observations at waypoint stops along the 5-mile (8-kilometer) route to Mount Sharp is to piece together the relationship between rock layers at "Yellowknife Bay" in the Glenelg area, where the mission found evidence of an ancient freshwater-lake environment favorable for microbial life, and layers at the main destination on lower slopes of Mount Sharp.

James Webb Space Telescope JWST: Mirror Inspection

Technicians and scientists check out one of the Webb telescope's first two flight mirrors on Sept. 19, 2012 in the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The mirrors are going through receiving and inspection and will then be stored in the Goddard clean room until engineers are ready to assemble them onto the telescope's backplane structure that will support them.

One of the Webb's science goals is to look back through time to when galaxies were young. To see such far-off and faint objects, Webb needs a large mirror.

A telescope's sensitivity, or how much detail it can see, is directly related to the size of the mirror area that collects light from the objects being observed.

A larger area collects more light, just like a larger bucket collects more water in a rain shower than a small one.

Image Credit: NASA.

NASA GRAIL: Launch Less Than One Month Away

At Astrotech Space Operation's payload processing facility in Titusville, Fla., NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory-A (GRAIL-A) lunar probe is lifted from its workstand and across the clean room toward the spacecraft adapter ring, at left, where GRAIL-B is already secured. 

Image Credit: NASA/KSC

NASA's twin lunar probes - GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B - completed their final inspections and were weighed one final time at the Astrotech Space Operations facility in Titusville, Fla., on Tuesday.

The two Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft will orbit the moon in formation to determine the structure of the lunar interior from crust to core and to advance understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon. GRAIL's launch period opens Sept. 8, 2011, and extends through Oct. 19.

For a Sept. 8 liftoff, the launch window opens at 5:37 a.m. PDT (8:37 a.m. EDT) and remains open through 6:16 a.m. PDT (9:16 a.m. EDT).

Later this week, the two spacecraft will be loaded side-by-side on a special adapter and packaged inside a payload fairing that will protect them during their launch into space.

Next week, GRAIL is expected to make the trip from Astrotech to Launch Complex 17 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station where it will be mated with its United Launch Alliance Delta II Heavy rocket.

GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will fly in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail. The mission will answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon, and provide scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.

NASA Shuttle Atlantis performs Back Flip

The Expedition 23 crew snapped this imageof the underside of Atlantis' crew cabin, during a survey of the approaching space shuttle prior to docking with the International Space Station.

Image Credit: NASA

NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour undergoes inspection by crew

Astronauts on the US space shuttle Endeavour on Tuesday finished routine inspection of the thermal protection system on the orbiter's wing leading edges and nose, NASA said.

The crew soared into orbit Monday carrying an observation deck for the International Space Station, a seven-windowed dome offering breathtaking views.

On much of their first day working in space, Commander George Zamka, Pilot Terry Virts and Mission Specialists Kay Hire, Stephen Robinson, Nicholas Patrick and Robert Behnken inspected heat-resistant tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon surfaces on those high friction areas.

"Zamka, Hire and Patrick used the shuttle's arm and its Orbital Boom Sensor System extension to survey Endeavour's right wing. Subsequently, Virts and Robinson joined the commander for the nose cap survey. Hire replaced Zamka for the port wing survey," NASA said.

The crew was looking for any sign of being hit by ice, and for foam insulation damage that in the past has plagued the external fuel tank. Images were beamed back to mission control in Houston, Texas, to be analyzed.

Some small bits of foam did break off two minutes after launch but apparently without harming the shuttle, Bill Gerstenmaeir, who is in charge of NASA space operations, said late Monday.

In addition to the heat tile inspection, which took about seven hours, the shuttle crew readied for its rendezvous with the ISS. Docking is scheduled for just after midnight 0506 GMT Wednesday.

The NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour pre-docking manouvre video