Review says NASA Curiosity rover missing 'scientific focus and detail'

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity took this self-portrait, composed of more than 50 images using its robotic arm-mounted MAHLI camera, on Feb. 3, 2013. 

The image shows Curiosity at the John Klein drill site. A drill hole is visible at bottom left. 

Credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS / Marco Di Lorenzo / Ken Kremer

NASA's planetary senior review panel harshly criticised the scientific return of the Curiosity rover in a report released yesterday (Sept. 3), saying the mission lacks focus and the team is taking actions that show they think the $2.5-billion mission is "too big to fail."

While the review did recommend the mission receive more funding, along with the other six NASA extended planetary missions being scrutinised, members recommended making several changes to the mission.

One of them would be reducing the distance that Curiosity drives in favor of doing more detailed investigations when it stops.

The role of the senior review, which is held every two years, is to help NASA decide what money should be allocated to its extended missions.

This is important, because the agency (as with many other departments) has limited funds and tries to seek a balance between spending money on new missions and keeping older ones going strong.

Engineering acumen means that many missions are now operating well past their expiry dates, such as the Cassini orbiter at Saturn and the Opportunity rover on Mars.

In examining the seven missions being reviewed, the panel did recommend keeping funding for all, but said that 4/7 are facing significant problems.

In the case of Curiosity, the panel called out principal investigator John Grotzinger for not showing up in person on two occasions, preferring instead to interact by phone.

The review also said there is a "lack of science" in its extended mission proposal with regard to "scientific questions to be answered, testable hypotheses, and proposed measurements and assessment of uncertainties and limitations."

Opportunity rover’s 1st mountain climbing goal is dead ahead in this up close view of Solander Point at Endeavour Crater. 

Opportunity has ascended the mountain looking for clues indicative of a Martian habitable environment. 

This navcam panoramic mosaic was assembled from raw images taken on Sol 3385 (Aug 2, 2013). 

Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer

Other concerns were the small number of samples over the prime and extended missions (13, a "poor science return"), and a lack of clarity on how the ChemCam and Mastcam instruments will play into the extended mission.

Additionally, the panel expressed concern that NASA would cut short its observations of clays (which could help answer questions of habitability) in favor of heading to Mount Sharp, the mission's ultimate science destination.

"In summary, the Curiosity … proposal lacked scientific focus and detail," the panel concluded, adding in its general recommendations for the reviews that principal investigators must be present to avoid confusion while answering questions.

The other missions facing concern from the panel included the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express and Mars Odyssey.

New paper reviews research on the grain of space-time

Smooth" or grainy? Is space-time continuous or is it made up of very fine (10-35 metres on the "Planck scale") but discrete grains, if we look at it very close up ?

If the latter were true, scientists think, this would lead to deviations from the theory of special relativity formulated by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago.

In some theoretical scenarios, the "non-continuity" of space-time implies violations to the invariance of the physical laws under the so-called Lorentz transformations (which establish that physical laws are the same for all inertial reference frames that are at the basis of special relativity).

Since the 90s physicists have devised several methods (often based on phenomena connected to high-energy astrophysics) to test these deviations from standard physics.

Stefano Liberati

Stefano Liberati, coordinator of the Astroparticle Physics group of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste, recently published a systematic review to present the state of the art in this field and the constraints that can be placed on the various models that predict violations to Special Relativity.

The paper is an invited Topic Review published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

This journal periodically asks leading world experts to "sum up" what is known in a specific field of study.

The review has now been selected as one of the journal's Highlight papers for 2013.

"Physicists have been wondering about the nature of space-time for years. We've been asking ourselves whether it is continuous at all scales, as we perceive it in our daily experience, or whether at very small sizes it presents an irregular grain that we, in our direct experience, are unable to perceive", explains Liberati.

"Imagine looking at a slab of marble from some distance: it will probably seem to have a uniform texture.

However, on closer inspection, for example using a powerful microscope, you can see that the marble is porous and irregular".

"In a certain sense physicists have been trying to do something similar with space-time: to find something that acts as a microscope to find out whether at very small length scales there is indeed some irregularity.

In my paper I presented a systematic overview of the experiments and observations that can be exploited to investigate the existence of these irregularities.

Special relativity is one of the cornerstones of modern physics and as such it is very important to test its validity, insofar as current observations allow us".

More information: 'Tests of Lorentz invariance: a 2013 update' S Liberati 2013 Class. Quantum Grav. 30 133001 doi:10.1088/0264-9381/30/13/133001

National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO): App to review Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Data

The Large Magellanic Cloud, an irregular galaxy, is visible in the night sky over the Earth's Southern Hemisphere and may contain hidden astronomical wonders yet to be revealed in the images collected by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). 

Credit: NASA)

University of Arizona computer scientists are teaming up with astronomers at the National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO) to develop a computer program that will sort through the millions of objects detected by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and create a list of priorities for astronomers to investigate.

The project has recently received a three-year INSPIRE grant, worth more than $700,000, from the National Science Foundation.

"The University of Arizona and NOAO were among the original founding members of the LSST project, making our collaboration to help ensure its success especially appropriate," said Tom Matheson, an associate astronomer at the Tucson-based NOAO.

High in the Andean peaks of Chile, work is underway to build a telescope that will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere of the sky every three nights for 10 years.

The LSST will create a map of the sky unlike any other, showing changes in astronomical objects almost as they happen over the 10-year period, and opening a floodgate for new astronomical discoveries and research worldwide as new objects are detected each night.

Located in the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Chile, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere of the sky every three days for ten years beginning in 2022. 

Credit: Suzanne Jacoby /LSST Project Office

Photographing a portion of the southern sky every 37 seconds each night, the LSST will compile a database of approximately a thousand images per night.

"We can take the picture from one night and subtract it from the picture from three nights before. Everything that has changed will show up in the image, so we can study how the sky varies," Matheson said.

"What we'll get is essentially a movie of the entire southern sky. At the end of the 10 years we can add up all the images and get a really deep picture of objects over the entire southern sky. It's a really fantastic science resource for astronomy," he added.

"It's also a huge amount of data," Matheson said. "In any one of those frames there will be about 10,000 things that change, so that's 10 million objects per night that have changed and we're going to have to figure out what of those is astronomically interesting."

While other astronomy projects are underway around the world to conduct similar surveys, none has ever attempted to map the sky on a scale such as this.

The problem: How to compare between 1 million and 10 million astronomical objects spotted each night by the LSST to the catalog of known objects, prioritize them based upon different factors, and generate a list of most important objects upon which astronomers around the world may train their telescopes.

The team: Matheson, UA associate professor of computer science and member of the UA BIO5 Institute, John Kececioglu, UA professor of computer science, Rick Snodgrass, UA professor of computer science, and NOAO astronomer Abhijit Saha.