“Just a minute!” tweeted NASA’s always adorable Curiosity Rover this morning. “That’s all it takes to see 9 months of my mission thanks to fan @krsanford’s time lapse.”

The labor of love in question is a 1-minute, 6-second YouTube clip showing an animated stream of raw images from the Front Hazard Avoidance Cameras, taken from NASA’s Curiosity pic dump.

It’s an amazing thing to watch. You get to see landscapes change and time pass each day as the rover explores and travels across the red planet, casting its robotic shadow as it gathers samples and laser-drills into rock.

Of course, this wouldn’t be possible without NASA’s open-sourcing the multimedia in the first place. But the real hero here is Karl Sanford, the enthusiastic fan who took the time to put it all together. On the YouTube page for the clip, he says, “This is my first attempt at this process and hope to update and refine these videos as more data becomes available.”

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Using a neutron gun and an infrared imaging camera at a location dubbed “Yellowknife Bay,” researchers found signs of hydration: water molecules bound to minerals in Martian rock.

“With Mastcam, we see elevated hydration signals in the narrow veins that cut many of the rocks in this area,” Melissa Rice, a CalTech researcher, said in a NASA statement. “These bright veins contain hydrated minerals that are different from the clay minerals in the surrounding rock matrix.”

Detection of water is important as NASA scientists attempt to determine if Mars ever supported life in the past … and if it could again in the future.

One interesting facet of the Curiosity rover is its international composition. The Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument, which detects hydrogen, is Russian-made. The Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) that investigated the clay-like material is from Canada. And, of course, the majority of the rover is of American manufacture.

“We definitely see signal variation along the traverse from the landing point to Yellowknife Bay,” said Maxim Litvak from the Moscow-based Space Research Institute. “More water is detected at Yellowknife Bay than earlier on the route. Even within Yellowknife Bay, we see significant variation.”

Curiosity is seven months into a scheduled two-year mission.

photo credit: nasa hq photo via photopin cc

It’s MacWorld’s 29th year, and it’s the fourth year since Apple unceremoniously took its ball and left. But it could just be the best MacWorld yet, with star power, fan power, and … ecosystem power.

“The show really has become the ultimate iFan festival,” MacWorld general manager Paul Kent told me last week. “We have training classes, celebrities, noted experts, tips and tricks … before it was really a platform for Apple, but now it’s really about the ecosystem.”

Kutcher and Gad will provide some of that celebrity star power, but not all of it.

Will.i.am will also be present to talk about technology, gadgets, and creativity with Intel futurist Brian David Johnson. And the NASA team behind the Mars rover Curiosity will also be in the Moscone Center, home of so many of Apple’s iconic product announcements, to talk about their use of Apple products.

“But perhaps the most interesting story is going to be the innovation in the products,” Kent said. “We have the accessory companies, over 100 app companies … it’s like walking into an Apple store, except that the products kind of come life at MacWorld.”

Forty percent of the companies demoing products are new to the market, Kent said, adding that MacWorld was sort of like “CES for Apple fans,” and perhaps the last great consumer-focused technology convention.

MacWorld/iWorld 2013 starts on Jan. 31st, in just over a week. IDG World Expo, the company behind the convention, expects “more than 25,000″ attendees.

Image credit: The Jobs Movie

Tonight, the Mars Curiosity rover will be sending a commemorative note to us Earthlings to celebrate the new year.

On Twitter, the anthropomorphized bot announced, “Will you be in @TimesSquareNYC for New Year’s Eve? Look for a special message from Mars on the giant Toshiba screens.”

The Toshiba LEDs at One Times Square will display the official New Year’s Eve countdown (Toshiba is the exclusive sponsor for the Official Countdown of the Times Square 2013 New Year’s Eve Celebration), and the company estimates more than one billion people around the world will be tuning into the broadcast this evening.

The Toshiba display will include a 60-second countdown to 2013 in the Eastern time zone, and it will also feature hourly countdowns and the Curiosity message, which Toshiba said includes a NASA-produced animation.

You can watch the screens live online or check out the entirety of the live broadcast for New Year’s Eve.

Foursquare users with a love for space and science have a new reward today: a brand-new badge from NASA, the space agency announced today.

Starting today, Foursquare users that like NASA’s account on the service may get a Curiosity Explorer badge, based on NASA’s extraterrestrial life-seeking Mars rover, whenever they check in to a NASA visitor center, a science museum, or a planetarium.

This isn’t the first time NASA has partnered with the location-based social network. The Curiosity rover became the first device to check-in on another planet when it arrived on Mars back in October, and it routinely sends updates from the planet in the form of factoids, Mars Photos, and other discoveries. And prior to Curiosity, NASA partnered with Foursquare to provide check-ins from the International Space Station.

NASA is one of the few government agency’s that really understands how to use the social web to both educate and promote what it’s doing. And the new Curiosity badge is yet another example of that. Also, anything that makes people pay more attention to science is a good thing in my book.

The Walking Dead
Released: July
Platforms: iOS
Developer: Telltale Games

Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead is groundbreaking in more than one way. An episodic adventure game in the classic style, today? Turns out, it’s a winner due to brilliant storytelling, solid controls, and, well, zombies. It’s based on the award-winning The Walking Dead comic book and television series, and by making this into a video game, it allowed for the introduction a new lead and set of supporting characters — a brilliant move. This enabled its authors to explore the same themes and ideas as the TV show and the comic book, but with a different emotional tone. Lee Everett and his young charge, Clementine, fill the emotional heart of the story in a way that Rick and his wife never quite do.

Curiosity
Released: November
Platforms: iOS
Developer: 22cans

The first release from Peter Molyneaux and 22cans is an experiment in massively multiplayer gaming with a simple yet compelling premise: “What’s in the center of the cube?” Like a huge virtual Tootsie Pop, the curiosity cube has layers upon layers of colored squares. You simply tap squares to remove them from the top layer of the world-sized cube — you and half a million players others using their iOS devices. Curiosity distills the very essence of its namesake, with teasing lines of prose scrolling across layers, various pictures buried in the skin of each cube layer, and some random coin earning mechanics. All of this seems to add up to one very innovative tapping experience that’s of a less game and more of a participatory experience.

Draw Something
Released: February
Platforms: iOS, Android
Developer: OMGPOP, Inc.
Draw Something was Zynga’s big gamble. Developed by indie team OMGPOP, Draw Something went viral and became as well known as Words With Friends or even Angry Birds. Why did this game become so popular? On the face of it, it’s a simple concept: This is nothing more than multiplayer Pictionary. Get a word and draw a picture that a friend attempts to guess. If they choose the correct word, you both get more points. Playing Draw Something is a lot more compelling, however. Artistic individuals challenge themselves to illustrate more and more abstract words with more and more elaborate, even painterly, images. Unfortunately, the Draw Something bubble burst soon after Zynga spent an obscene amount of money to acquire it. Still, the game continues to have a loyal following, with folks spending real money to buy new colors, word lists, and the like.

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition
Released: December
Platforms: iOS
Developer: Overhaul Games
One of the pillars of RPG gaming from BioWare recently showed up on iOS, and it still made a huge splash with retro enthusiasts and hardcore RPG fans alike. While the enhancements include new playable characters with new backstories and touch-appropriate controls, this is essentially the same game as came out for PC 14 years ago. The game uses Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules, making it as hardcore and difficult as the original PC game. While RPG games continue to streamline and simplify to interest new players, this 1998 gem remains as true to the form as ever, which is a powerful draw.

The World Ends With You
Released: August
Developer: Square Enix
The World Ends With You made me sit up and take notice when it first released in North America in 2008. The J-Pop flavor of the score; the quirky angst of protagonist Neku and his spunky, optimistic partners, Shiki, Joshua, and Beat; the fun mechanics of searching for and then fighting demons; the overarching storyline of The Game and its Reapers — this is not a typical handheld game. When it came to iOS this year, the loss of the dual-screen combat mechanic proved to have less of an impact than I feared. It’s still a ton of fun to play, with an irreverent wit and unique gameplay mechanics I’ve not seen anywhere else.

Bastion
Released: August
Platforms: iOS
Developer: Supergiant Games
Supergiant Games had a monster hit on its hands with Bastion, one of the best downloadable console games of the last several years. That it’s now available on an iPad or iPhone for five bucks is a revelation. Players follow The Kid through a dying world that somehow re-assembles itself ahead of the main character. The soundtrack is an oddly joyous combination of future-Western loops, guitar work, and haunting vocals — be sure to get the soundtrack if nothing else. The narration makes it all come together, as it tells its simple but compelling story about saving the world, one hammered monster at a time. It works exceedingly well on the touchscreen, too.

Plague Inc.
Released: May
Platforms: iOS, Android
Developer: Ndemic Creations
You’d think that a game featuring the travel paths of a viral plague would be dead boring, but Ndemic Creations proves that a game that’s essentially a spreadsheet simulation of a deadly viral plague across the globe is compelling entertainment. It has no fancy 3D graphics, cutscenes, or voice work, just a map of the world, several choices about how to best spread the disease most effectively (rats? air travel? mosquitos?), and a well-built simulation of how the world responds to your pandemic infection. It’s a chilling and realistic look at how disease can and does spread from place to place.

Angry Birds Star Wars
Released: November
Platforms: iOS, Android
Developer: Rovio Entertainment
Rovio somehow put two of the strongest intellectual properties together into one incredibly lust-worthy combination. Star Wars plus Angry Birds seems like an odd match, but it hit number one in the iTunes app charts within the first two and a half hours of release. It likely sold a huge number of copies via the Google Play store as well: Who can resist Angry Birds with lightsabers and officially sanctioned Star Wars sound effects? No one, that’s who.

Letterpress
Released: October
Platforms: iOS
Developer: atebits
Letterpress is like Boggle with friends with a particularly nasty twist: When you tap out words using the letters provided in the grid, they turn blue, taking points and potential victory from your opponent, chosen at random or from your Game Center friends list. The longer the word, the more points you get, and the less your opponent can rack up. It’s Othello or Go with letters and words, all built with care and a clean, modern design aesthetic.

Fieldrunners 2
Released: July
Platforms: iOS
Developer: Subatomic Studios
Tower defense games are all over the various mobile platforms, perhaps more than any other type of game. The opportunity for deep strategy exists with the tower defense genre, as does quick, pick-up-and-play instant gratification. Fieldrunners 2 is the apogee of tower defense games, as it boasts a variety of sub-genres, like open fields, fixed path, and survival wave modes. It has plenty of towers for you to buy and upgrade, more enemy types, and three levels of difficulty to try your patience and skill.

Infinity Blade II
Released: November 2011
Platforms: iOS
Developer: Chair Entertainment Group
Infinity Blade II came out in November of 2011, so it just missed our top iOS games post last year. Let’s rectify that now. This is a showcase title on any mobile device, though it does only exist on iOS at this point.  Infinity Blade II is a must-own title for iPad an iPhone gamers wanting to see the cutting edge of mobile gaming and visual design, due to the combination of console-level graphical quality and surprisingly tactile combat. It makes good on the promise of the first title, adding more story, more giant beasts to slay, and a continually satisfying challenge throughout.

Horn
Released: August
Platforms: iOS, Android
Developer: Phosphor Games
Horn surprises with a well-developed fantasy world, solid controls, and a quirky sense of humor that permeates across encounters, levels, and character design. Horn is a delight to play; it’s also farther away from Zynga’s core casual business as I thought was even possible. The platforming is well done, the three-dimensional environments are fun to explore and play through, and the enemies are a striking mix of science and magic.

Super Hexagon
Released: August
Platforms: iOS
Developer: Terry Cavanagh
Those who like punishing, tough retro arcade games are bound to thrill to Super Hexagon, developed by indie darling Terry Cavanagh. The point is to rotate your triangle-shaped avatar around a pulsating, spinning, chip-tune spewing hexagon, avoiding the walls that close in on the center in wave after endless wave. Survival is the point of Super Hexagon, moving minimally and staying one step ahead of things as they spin, flash, and pound like a bad trip at a rave.

Waking Mars
Released: February
Platforms: iOS, Android
Developer: Tiger Style Games
Waking Mars takes you on a trip to the red planet to explore, trapping you underneath the surface. You’ll need to navigate a maze-like system of caves, teeming with varieties of plant life that you’ll need to harness to survive, and, eventually, terraform Mars with. If you liked Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, you’ll enjoy Waking Mars for the story, the gorgeous artwork, and a compelling science fictional storyline set on one of our favorite planets to dream about.

Rayman Jungle Run
Released: September
Platforms: iOS, Android
Developer: Ubisoft
The smartest thing Ubisoft could have done with its popular Rayman franchise was to release it to iOS and Android, not as a copycat game full of poorly translated controls schemes, but as a mobile title built specifically for the platform’s touch-based control systems. Rayman Jungle Run is an endless runner, like Canabalt or Jetpack Joyride, but it trades on the glorious cel-shaded illustration, cartoony animation, and delightful ukulele-infused soundtrack that made the console version of Rayman: Origins such fun to play. That joy translates well to the mobile version of Rayman as you jump, swing, and soar across several well designed levels with smooth touch controls.

NASA’s Curiosity rover analyzed its first scoop on Mars and found water molecules in “higher than anticipated” quantities, according to an announcement from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory today.

The water found attached to sand or other particles is “not unusual,” according to JPL, but the quantities are surprising as the team looks for organic compounds in Martian soil.

Currently, the Mars rover is stationed at “Rocknest,” which the JPL team choose for its dusty conditions. They researchers felt that Curiosity could use the dirt here to clean out its arm, which scoops up material and delivers it to analysis tools inside its body. The arm needed to be cleaned of any Earth materials that could get mixed in with the Martian samples.

This was the first time Curiosity has used all of its instruments in analyzing the regolith, or Martian soil. This included its Sample Analysis at Mars tool (SAM), the Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin), and others. Indeed, it cooked some of the dirt in a tiny oven inside its body.

The regolith here revealed volcanic-like properties similar to Hawaii as well as glass particles. Some of the dirt further revealed carbon-based chlorine and oxygen compound called perchlorate. This was first discovered by NASA’s Pheonix Lander. “One-carbon organics” were also created when dirt was heated inside the tiny oven, meaning that we could be one-step closer to understanding how life could form on Mars. We’re still a long way off, however, because NASA says the chemical reactions that formed the carbon may have been the product of an Earthly object mixing in with the regolith.

After Curiosity is done analyzing the martian dirty here, it will head off toward its ultimate destination Mount Sharp. Its mission is to determine whether or not the Gale Crater ever had the environment that could have sustained microorganisms.

Curiosity scoops image via JPL

Thanks to NASA’s Curiosity rover, scientists have been able to track wind and radiation patterns on Mars in an attempt to discover whether conditions there were ever favorable to life.

Initial readings found that levels of radiation are about the same as those astronauts typically experience in the low-Earth orbit. “Absolutely, astronauts can live in this environment,” Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said during a news conference Thursday.

Hassler explained that Mars’ natural environment acts as a shield for the radiation on the surface. This supports the notion that astronauts can set foot and even function on the Red Planet for a short stretches of time.

Curiosity’s fancy instrument, the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD), monitors high-energy radiation in the environment; this could also be a factor in determining whether Mars has the potential to host lifeforms.

Researchers believe that Mars lost its global magnetic field long ago due to solar wind bombardment. RAD reported that as the remaining Martian atmosphere thickens and thins daily, radiation levels rise and fall by 3 percent to 5 percent.

As was first reported in a NASA blog post, researchers stationed in a car-sized mobile lab are specifically tracking events with a least one characteristic of a whirlwind. They are also linking the rhythmic changes in radiation to daily atmospheric changes, which will lead to a better understanding the native environment.

The overarching goal of the mission is to use assess whether areas inside Gale Crater, an area of Mars where Curiosity landed, once offered a habitable environment for microbes.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

I just spent the last 10 minutes chipping pixels away from a giant video game cube.

That is the central gameplay of noted video game maker Peter Molyneux’s first effort with developer 22Cans, Curiosity. It’s terribly boring, so why did I do it? Well, because I’m curious — and that curiosity may prove to be the first time that Molyneux has delivered on his wide-sweeping promises of emotional and affecting game development.

Molyneux’s game is an experiment that tests the boundaries of human curiosity. You see, everyone is chipping away at the same cube. It’s hiding a secret beneath its many layers, and collectively, we’ll reveal whatever it is. But here’s the kicker: Only one player will get to see the secret.

Curiosity is a free-to-play game available now on Android and iOS. It’s gameplay is no deeper than what I already described, but it does have an in-app store where players can buy tools to help them chip apart the cube faster.

This strange game poses many questions. First, will anyone actually suffer through the boring mechanics for a minuscule chance of finding out the secret?

When I started up my game, it told me that I am something like the game’s 48,000th player, which means I have at least a 1 in 48,000 chance of discovering the secret at this point. That’s without knowing how long it will take to open the cube. I doubt I’ll stick with it long enough to have any chance at all.

Second, will people pay money to improve their chances to learn a secret that could prove to be very anticlimactic?

As players chip away at the pixels, the game awards coins. You can use those coins in the game’s shop to buy tools like the Iron Chisel. This item destroys nine “cublets” at a time for 5 minutes. Every item has a time limit. This tool costs 300,000 coins. I have 340. According to 22Cans plans for downloadable content, 300,000 Curiosity coins costs about $8 if you’d rather pay than mindlessly tap for coins.

But that’s nothing. The Diamond Chisel costs 3 billion coins, or $80,000.

Third, what will the winner do with the secret?

In the official contest rules, the 22Cans notes that the secret is some kind of video. The “winner” can share it however he chooses, or he can keep it for himself. Some have speculated that the winner could auction off the video to the highest bidder, but 22Cans forbids them from using the secret for monetary gain.

Beyond the obvious questions, Curiosity is yet another game that reveals the dark nature of humans.

Since each cubelet is essentially a pixel in the larger cube, people have begun to draw images and write words that everyone who is playing the game can see. Naturally, these words are universally terrible. Someone emblazoned one of the cube’s sides with a vile racial slur. It’s the first thing I saw when I booted up the game. It’s kind of scary how quickly everything humans do devolves into something mean and stupid. And yet, the word is no longer legible as other players work to erase it.

And perhaps that is the larger point of this experiment:

22Cans provided a canvas or a playing field to a bunch of humans. Terrible people use it to do something that upset decent people. That inspires those decent people to take action and undue what the awful people did. But the truth is that both groups are working toward the same ultimate goal. They are two sides of the same coin and they motivate one another into a perpetual cycle that powers this entire game.

It’s a microcosm of humanity’s faux-duality. We think we’re all so different from one another. Democrats think Republicans are holding them back and vice versa. But the hidden truth is that we need our opposites to motivate us. We think we’re working against one another, but the constant back and forth of every human struggle accomplishes the same thing: The advancement of the human species.

Or maybe it’s just a bunch of people goofing off on their phones while they use the bathroom.

Peter Molyneux is a veteran game designer. Recently, he was in charge of the Fable role-playing game series for Microsoft while running his Lionhead Studios. He made his name with the 1989 strategic god-simulator Populous for PC. Molyneux left Lionhead in March to work with a former colleague at 22Cans. He may be best known for making wild, interesting promises about his games without necessarily delivering on them. This character trait is so prominent that it spawned a Twitter parody account called PeterMolydeux who only tweets insane ideas for games, like one about a character who wakes up with amnesia in a museum dedicated to his life.

So while Molyneux has a history of promising something different, this time, he may have delivered.

Right now, Curiosity is just an enigma. It’ll be most interesting when the game is over and we find out all the interesting stats from Molyneux. Did anyone actually buy the $80,000 chisel? How much money did the person who won spend? What the hell is this video all about?

That last question will probably have the least climactic answer, but try telling that to a curious human who just wants to know what is in the cube.

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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory prepared for a lot of variables when it sent Curiosity, the car sized rover, to Mars, but it didn’t prepare for it to become a tween-aged girl on Myspace.

Just kidding. The Mars Curiosity rover took a “selfie,” or a picture you take of yourself from a flattering angle. Curiosity was actually taking its own portrait for researchers down on Earth to use as an example of how the rover looked at the beginning of its mission. It will periodically send these images, which researchers at JPL will use to see if Curiosity’s wheels are clogged with dirt, or if it has any other kind of damage.

Right now the rover seems to be in pretty good shape, though these images are only thumbnails stitched together to give us the full view of Curiosity. It will later send a high-definition version of the selfie that the researchers can use for examination.

Curiosity previously took high-def images of a shiny material found in the martian soil. This particular shiny piece was actually just plastic, but Curiosity’s cameras later helped researchers determine that there were separate, native shiny-particles in the regolith, or Mars dirt. Curiosity took up a few more scoops to do some research and found that Mars’ soil is similar to the volcanic soil in Hawaii.

You can see the scoop marks on the left side of the image.

hat tip Gizmodo; Curiosity image via JPL

Shiny objects found on the surface of Mars may, in fact, be native to the planet. Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team sent commands to the Mars Curiosity Rover today to pick up a bit of the reflective stuff and, if all goes well, perform its first analysis of the landscape since landing.

JPL says it will send commands to Curiosity today and will later analyze the scoop using “one of the Rover’s internal analytical instruments, the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument.” It will be further analyzed by a tool called the SAM, or Sample Analysis at Mars instrument.

After taking high-resolution images of the first “shiny object,” the JPL team decided it was likely a piece of plastic or wire either from the Rover or from the craft that carried the Rover to Mars. However, after Curiosity picked up its second scoop, the team saw other pieces of reflective material within the clumps of Martian dirt.

This scoopful was discarded when the team saw more of the shiny material in the hole left by Curiosity’s scoop. The team didn’t want to introduce foreign particles to Curiosity’s internal analysis tools, but after reevaluating, JPL believes this could be a natural part of the Mars landscape.

Last week, Curiosity grabbed its first scoop and took video while it vibrated the regolith, or Martian dirt, to get rid of excess material. It later used the sample to clean the analysis tools and make sure no other debris was sitting in the Rover’s tubes.

Mars debris image via Nasa

The above video is another extraterrestrial first: Curiosity’s very first collection of Martian regolith via its robotic arm’s scooper, as seen from the rover’s mast camera.

“Here’s the scoop: I like my regolith shaken!” the rover’s social media team tweeted of the clip, which shows the scoop full of Mars’ topmost layer and vibrating to sort the material.

Regolith is a layer of dust, broken rock, and soil loosely covering solid rock. We get a bit of it here on Earth, and it’s also present on our own moon, some asteroids, and other planets, including Mars.

Currently, researchers are trying to find out whether or not Mars’ regolith is being shaped by groundwater sapping and whether carbon dioxide hydrates exist on the planet. The hypothesis is that water and CO2 are frozen and hidden in the regolith in large quantities, especially around the planet’s equator and at high altitudes.

This particular sample, however, will be used for cleaning bits of Curiosity’s sample-handling mechanism, with the sandy collection being vibrated inside each interior chamber and then discarded.

“The rover’s ability to put scooped and sieved samples of soil into onboard laboratory instruments is an important part of the mission,” NASA stated on the news.

“Those instruments — Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) — will play crucial roles in evaluating whether the study area has ever had a favorable environment for microbial life. Still to be used for the first time is the rover’s capability to take powdered samples from rocks, using a percussive drill, for delivery to those same instruments.”

Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got somethin’ to say, but nothin’ comes out when they move their lips — just a bunch of gibberish. VentureBeat readers act like they forgot about Mars.

But seriously, we haven’t forgotten about Mars and everyone’s favorite lil’ rover buddy up there, Curiosity.

In this video, Internet hero Bobby “Starry Mohawk” Ferdowsi leads us through an update on the rover’s progress (with Morse code for “JPL” shaved into the side of his meme-spawning head, no less).

This week, Curiosity’s Martian road trip began, complete with road tunes from Will.i.am, analysis of Mars’ atmosphere, and lasers being used on the planet’s surface for, you know, science. Lasers will come into play more as Curiosity rolls toward one of its targets, Glenelg, an intersection of three types of terrain near the rover’s landing site.

“The rover’s Chemistry and Camera [ChemCam] instrument shot its laser at rocks exposed by thrusters on the rover’s sky crane at the scour mark called Goulburn,” we read on the ChemCam site today.

“They show differences in brightness at the impact spot as well as a slight change in shadows. The inset shows an area about 1 square-inch [2.5 centimeters per side]. The target is about 19 feet [5.8 meters] away from the rover.”

Here are some before/after pics of the ChemCam laser’s work:

The Mars Curiosity rover isn’t just a bad-ass robot scientist roaming the badlands of Mars. It’s also a jukebox. The rover transmitted Black Eyed Peas singer Will.I.Am’s latest song, “Reach for the Stars.” Tacky? Maybe. But it’s a song from Mars.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory radioed the song using Curiosity today over the 150 million miles between our planets. It was good publicity for everyone involved: Will.I.Am got to stand behind the idea that if you dream it, you can do it; and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got a second boost of “coolness.” What was the first boost? Obviously its mohawk-ed employee, which inspired Obama to to consider changing his own do.

The New York Times notes that the Curiosity rover sadly does not have speakers to play the song on the red planet, though the audio wouldn’t come out the same in Mars’ atmosphere anyway.

JPL isn’t foreign to celebrities either. The lab invited a number of stars, from movie actors like Morgan Freeman to singers like Will.I.Am himself, to watch the “seven minutes of terror”: the decent the Curiosity rover made to Mars and the 7 minutes it took the rover to transmit its landing to JPL.

Check out a video of the song here:

via The New York Times; Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech

Now that the Curiosity rover’s cameras are open and fully operational, it’s sending back gorgeous and fascinating shots like the one above, a 360-degree panorama showing the rollerbot as it approaches Mars‘s Mt. Sharp.

“With the addition of four high-resolution Navigation Camera, or Navcam, images, taken on Aug. 18 (Sol 12), Curiosity’s 360-degree landing-site panorama now includes the highest point on Mount Sharp visible from the rover,” reads NASA’s update on the image.

Mt. Sharp is the rover’s destination — rather, geological deposits around the mountain’s base, to be precise. The mountain towers 3.4 miles above Gale Crater, where the Curiosity rover first landed two weeks ago.

The panorama is a stitched-up mosaic of 26 Navcam images taken in the wee hours of August 7/August 8, plus four new images taken on the 18th.

Also, we’ve got this new video showing Curiosity’s landing in glorious high-resolution. We’ve seen the landing before, but only through low-res cameras in a grainy stop-motion-style video clip.

Last week, we also got to see an interactive 360-degree panorama of the Martian landscape created by photographer Andrew Bodrov. Today’s image, however, is the first time we’re seeing Mt. Sharp through Curosity’s eyes.

The goal of the Curiosity mission is to gather and analyze the Mt. Sharp geological deposits for “organic compounds and environmental conditions that could have supported microbial life now or in the past.”

NASA’s scientists have taken advantage of 3D graphics and game-like simulations to figure out how to control the rover Curiosity on the rocky Martian landscape.

Nvidia’s Ken Brown said today on the graphics chip maker’s blog that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to use 3D vision technology (stereoscopic 3D glasses) to figure out how to control the expensive Curiosity explorer from 352 million miles away. It’s a cool dual use of technology for gaming and science. Besides, the huge volume of game PCs and graphics cards sold on the commercial market helps pay for high-end research and development into advanced graphics, which is just what folks such as the JPL researchers need.

Since it takes at least 14 minutes to get a signal to Mars, the Curiosity can’t be operated the same way you drive in Mario Kart 7. By the time a driver sees an obstacle on the rocky landscape, it may be too late to stop.

So the team at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., created a simulated environment, like a video game, to test each action before telling the rover to move. The Robot Sequencing and Visualization Program, or RSVP, is a 3D virtual environment with Martian terrain captured by the rover. The scientists created a detailed 3D model of Curiosity and viewed it within the landscape using off-the-shelf 3D Vision glasses. They then map out complex movements for operating things such as Curiosity’s robotic arm. Each day, the JPL team plots a path of about 130 feet.

The team can see the simulated movement in real time, thanks to Nvidia Quadro 5000 graphics cards in a PC that a gamer would love to have.

[Image credit: JPL/Gizmodo]

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Ever wanted to explore Mars just like you can explore Earth on Google Maps? Now you can, thanks to an incredible new 360-degree panorama on 360Cities.

Photographer Andrew Bodrov has created a way to explore the Mars surface by stitching together photos from the Mars Curiosity rover. While the rover’s camera isn’t top-notch by today’s standards, it still does a great job showing us the surface of the Red Planet, especially rocky soil and the Marian horizon.

The explorable image lets you zoom, pan, and easily navigate the landscape. It’s the closet thing we have yet to feeling like we’re actually on Mars.

Click here to explore Mars’ surface in 360 degrees.

You can view more photos from Curosity at NASA.gov or in the gallery below:

Photo: 360Cities.com

We’re not going to apologize for this: When President Obama muses about getting his own mohawk inspired by Bobak Ferdowsi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), you’re going to get another post about the landing on Mars.

“I understand there’s a special mohawk guy who’s working on the mission?” said President Obama in his call to JPL, “You know, I, in the past, have thought about getting a mohawk myself. My team keeps on discouraging me. Now that he’s received marriage proposals and thousands of Twitter followers, I’m going to go back to my team and see if it makes sense.”

Last week, JPL successfully landed a rover on Mars called Curiosity. Right after the landing, memes about Ferdowsi’s head spread across the Internet. You can’t blame Obama for wanting a little bit of that action in an election year. Mashable notes one Twitter user, @Darth, already created a Mohawk meme for the POTUS himself, which you can see above.

This was Obama’s second congratulations to the JPL team, after issuing a statement the day of landing. The President expects this mission is a precursor to an “even more audacious undertaking,” otherwise known as sending a human to Mars. He also thanked a number of countries — including Spain, Russian, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Japan, and Australia — that helped the U.S. send Curiosity to Mars.

“If, in fact, you do make contact with Martians, please let me know right away,” Obama concluded. “Because I’ve got a lot of other things on my plate, but I suspect that that will go to the top of the list!”

Check out the video of JPL on the call with the President:

Image via @Darth/Twitter

When we first saw pictures from NASA’s Curosity mission to Mars, many of us asked, “That’s it?” Yes, the images weren’t as detailed as we wanted, but they were from another planet, so we happily gobbled them up.

But why does the Mars rover feature paltry 2-megapixel sensors on its main imaging cameras? The decision stems from planning of the rover’s systems back in 2004, Malin Space Science Systems project manager Mike Ravine told Digital Photography Review.

The planning team selected the 2-megapixel sensor on Curiosity for several reasons. First, it had to produce a reasonable amount of data for transmission back to Earth via a UHF transmitter. Second, it had to meet the needs of four different camera types. Third, the team had deep familiarity with this imaging technology.

“We developed all four cameras around a common architecture, so the choice of sensor was hedged across all of them,” Ravine said. “We wanted to be able to capture high frame rates, particularly with the descent camera. We also looked at a 4MP sensor, but it would have run around half as fast. And the state of CMOS sensors wasn’t credible in 2004. They’re an interesting option now, but they weren’t then.”

In light of advanced camera technology featured on today’s smartphones, Ravine seems slightly disappointed the images on Mars aren’t more breathtaking.

“There’s a popular belief that projects like this are going to be very advanced, but there are things that mitigate against that,” Ravine said. “These designs were proposed in 2004, and you don’t get to propose one specification and then go off and develop something else. 2MP with 8GB of flash [memory] didn’t sound too bad in 2004. But it doesn’t compare well to what you get in an iPhone today.”

As you might know, the latest iPhone features an 8-megapixel sensor with 1080p HD video recording. It’s ultimately more powerful than what Curiosity has, showing how far camera technology has come in the past few years. Heck, Nokia even has a 41-megapixel camera in one of its phones.

To compensate for having less powerful sensors, Curiosity’s Mastcam can take multiple images and stitch them together. In the photo above, you can see how this function can create panoramas and better detail.

You can view more photos from Curosity at NASA.gov. Or check out the gallery below:

Film maker Brandon Fibbs has created a video inspired by the Mars rover touch down on Sunday that gives the rest of us a better idea of the emotions the folks in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) control room were feeling at the time of the event.

Fibbs, who previously created the Penny4Nasa promo video featuring the voice talents of his friend Neil deGrasse Tyson, was on site at the JPL during the Mars landing. “I was compelled to produce something that approximated my experiences,” he said of his latest work.

The $2.5 billion mission’s rover took around seven minutes to make its landing on the red planet’s surface. The car-sized Mars Science Laboratory rover landed in Gale Crater at the foot of a layered mountain. While previous missions focused on finding water on the red planet, the Curiosity mission will look for ancient habitable environments.

Fibbs’ video, titled Dare Mighty Things: Curiosity on Mars, is best described as a theatrical trailer for “Curiosity: The Motion Picture.” It includes a collection of NASA-produced animations, telemetry data, onboard vehicle instrumentation, incident audio, and JPL footage. As for the audio, Fibbs used a portion of the TRON: Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk as well as “narration from those NASA/JPL leaders most responsible for transforming one of the most complex engineering feats the agency has ever attempted into one of its proudest, finest hours.”

Let us know what you think of the video in the comment section.

This post is part of a series produced by Singularity University.

After more than eight years of planning and a 254-day journey through the cold emptiness of space, NASA’s Curiosity rover has finally landed on Mars.  Curiosity is the most advanced mobile robotic science lab to ever explore another planet and thus this is an exciting moment for NASA and the world.

But robotics and artificial intelligence continue to advance at an exponential rate. As we look towards the future of space exploration in the next decade and beyond, we can expect the next generation of space robots to be orders of magnitude more powerful and intelligent, while at the same time costing a fraction of Curiosity’s $2.5 billion price tag.

Regardless of the success of the Mars rover Curiosity, debates will rage again about robotic versus human space exploration. We don’t have the budgets to build the right technology to send humans to the planets and beyond. So we’ve been sending probes out into the solar system as precursor missions for the day we step on another planet and explore other worlds ourselves. But the bigger question for now is about the technology we are using. How do we make sure what we send in space is current? True, Curiosity is the most advanced rover ever made. The development started over eight years ago. How does it compare to recent technological advancements?

Some of the technologies Curiosity carries are similar to what a person might carry on a vacation trip to an exotic destination: several cameras with 4 GB flash cards, a 200 MHz computer, and a transportation vehicle the size of a small rental car.  Like a tourist in a remote location, most days Curiosity can only send messages back home at dial-up speeds (just enough to send emails and some Twitter posts). But it does get “broadband” for 8 minutes a day to send HD images and video from Mars.

At the beginning of Curosity’s exploration of Mars, we look forward to the new images and discoveries. The rover aims to explore for a Martian year, but the nuclear power source may last for 14 years. What does the future hold for Curiosity?

I hope that today’s landing will be followed by a step that has become routine on interplanetary missions: The software on the rover will be updated. Even though spacecraft travel at high speeds through the solar system, the travel times are long enough that software advances can be significant. The software has already been updated once during its 8-month flight.

Beaming software is one way robots throughout the solar system can take advantage of exponential advances on Earth. In a few more years, the computing systems on interplanetary robots will be able to run extremely complex AI programs due to further advances in exponential technology. Perhaps advanced chips will be sent out to be fitted onto older spacecraft, and extend the life of rovers like Curiosity.

Advancement in autonomous navigation systems, such as those used by the Google Cars, and intelligent data understanding (reacting to unexpected events) are current technologies. The rise of semantic technologies (such as a future version of Watson or Siri on Mars) and machine learning will drastically change robotic missions in the near future.

Advanced software could be hosted on the next generations of Mars rovers, or even retrofitted into rovers like Curiosity. Around the time AI systems are creating the next AI systems on Earth, we may be able to beam AI programs out to robots on Mars with a complexity beyond human understanding.

When this happens, would there even be a reason to leave Earth to explore the Universe? Do we enhance our experience through the robots we send out into the cosmos with highly sophisticated exponential sensor technologies that will serve as our eyes and ears – beaming back fully immersive experiences, without traveling for years – or do we even get superseded by super-robots who could one day think for themselves?

Through radical advances in processors including quantum computing, on-board decision making and exponential learning, a robotic intelligence on Mars may eventually “wake up.” How will we know? A sign might be when we tell the rover to go a certain direction, and it disagrees, and then goes a different way based on its own interest. One day, Curiosity itself may become curious.

Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom is VP of Operations for Singularity University. She spent two decades in the private space sector working on program development and operations for companies and organizations like Space Adventures, Odyssey Moon and the International Space University. She co-authored the book Realizing Tormorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To round out your Monday evening, we leave you with this, a brief, grainy, but exciting video from NASA’s Curiosity rover mission to Mars.

This clip, which was just tweeted out by NASA, is the first video that shows Curiosity’s actual descent from onboard cameras — not a simulation, and not images from other spacecraft.

The low-resolution video is a stop-motion clip shot at four frames per second by the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI), which was designed to help the rover/science laboratory land safely on the red planet’s surface.

The clip shows the last two minutes or so of the descent, from the point at which the heatshield separated until the rover was on the ground.

While other visualizations floating around YouTube are glossier, they’re about as real as anything you’d see in a special effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster. What we cherish about this imperfect clip is that it’s absolutely the real deal — the NASA equivalent of a crappy home movie showing a meaningful and amazing moment in space exploration history.

A joyful NASA team celebrates a successful and historic landing on Mars.

It’s rare that humanity lands on another planet.  Yesterday, as a guest of JPL director Charles Elachi, along with a long list of space luminaries such as Jeff Bezos, Dennis Tito, Steve Jurvetson, George Whitesides, Buzz Aldrin, and hundreds more, I made my pilgrimage to Pasadena to be present for what the media called “seven minutes of terror.” That was the final descent of JPL’s Curiosity lander through the thin Martian atmosphere, as it slowed from 13,000 miles per hour to 1 mph while executing a long list of complicated maneuvers.

Historically, only 33% of Mars lander missions have succeeded, and this landing was particularly complicated. It was no wonder, then, that stress was high and many were predicting the potential for a big crash.  But NASA’s boldness paid off: the rover Curiosity, a 1 ton, 6-wheeled robot, successfully landed on the surface of Mars exactly as planned at 10:31pm Pacific time.

Charlie Bolden, the Administrator of NASA aptly said, “This isn’t JPL’s rover, or NASA’s rover, it America’s Rover. In this moment, we should all be very proud.”

Many considered this mission way too risky; its landing configuration was crazy in its complexity.  That’s to be expected since the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. What the success of Curiosity highlights is the importance of our being bold and audacious. It takes big risks to drive breakthroughs. Financial risks, technical risks, and — when it comes to funding billion dollar programs — political risks. Apollo was one of the great risks this country took that paid off gloriously, allowing humanity to make its first step on another world.

How unfortunate it is when America, itself one of the riskiest ventures in history, fails to take such risks. The United States had an opportunity to build the Supercollider, which would have been larger than the Large Hadron Collider which recently unlocked the Higgs Boson. Who knows what mysteries of the universe could have been discovered? Instead, billions were spent for a project that was never completed.

I spend much of my time as executive chairman of Singularity University and as CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation.  At SU we teach attending graduate students and executives about exponentially growing technology. More importantly, we speak about the importance of taking risk to create breakthroughs and the importance of failing early and failing often — the Silicon Valley formulation for innovation.

Today there’s a new generation of young commercial space companies entering on the horizon that may someday push the frontiers of science.  But for now, and the next couple of decades, spending the billions required to explore Mars, search for life on Europa, and develop cutting-edge science hardware like the Webb Telescope is exactly where our government (and others) must be focusing.  Ultimately taking such risks is the province of government.

The role of government is not accomplishing “sure things,” it’s in taking risks that the private sector simply can’t. If government missions aren’t failing on occasion, it probably means that they’re not pushing the envelope hard enough. We need these bold ventures to inspire the next generation to pursue science and technology. No amount of STEM education funding could accomplish what the Apollo program did in terms of inspiring an entire generation with the wonder of technology.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s definitely worth mentioning the efforts of numerous private companies backed by risking taking investors, enabled by exponentially-growing technologies.  Companies like SpaceX, the many Google Lunar X PRIZE teams (building rovers to land on the surface of the Moon in pursuit of a $30M purse), Virgin Galactic, XCOR and Sierra Nevada Corporation, as well as my own recently announced company Planetary Resources (which I co-founded with Eric Anderson to focus on mining near-Earth asteroids). All of these companies are reaching for the stars with great energy.

That said, none of these efforts would exist today had it not been for the past 50-years of NASA efforts. As long as the government is willing to take the risks involved in big, bold ventures, they’ll pave the way for the private sector to make space available to everyone. It’s tempting, during times of economic troubles, to turn inward and away from risky ventures. But it’s only through boldness and audacity that we can be inspired to innovate and ultimately to succeed.

Tonight as Dr. Elachi came to visit the group I was with at JPL, he quoted President Teddy Roosevelt in a fashion that underscores this point, “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure.”

Peter Diamandis is the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation and the co-founder and chairman of Singularity University.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It didn’t take long for Internet users to transform the successful Mars rover landing into its own meme — with funny images popping up maybe 5 to 10 minutes after the Curiosity mission’s first steps went off without a hitch last night.

Mere moments after the Mars rover’s first image of the planet’s surface went online, Matthew Inman (aka The Oatmeal) had superimposed a vicious Alien within it and shared on Facebook. There were so many Curiosity-related posts (including memes) on community news site Reddit that they actually overpowered the number of cat pictures, which is not an easy task.

Then, this morning, VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell informed me that there’s a Tumblr page dedicated to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) mission activity lead Bobak Ferdowsi, who most people know as that dude with the gnarly Mohawk from last night’s Curiosity mission broadcast. The Tumblr page, appropriately named “NASA needs more Mohawks,” already has eight pages of meme-based content dedicated to Ferdowsi and others from the JPL crew.

The rapid meme creation shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, especially since meme-maker 4Chan recently announced its billionth post. That said, I was a little surprised at the number of image that were actually funny. We’ve taken the liberty of collecting a handful of the good ones in the gallery embedded below. (And since our Disqus-powered comment section allows for image-based replies, feel free to point out any good memes we missed.)

h/t to Chris “Crispy” Lloyd for the headline

This morning, we’re taking a look at some of the first photos sent back from NASA’s latest mission to Mars, and they’re breathtaking.

Even though they’re just black-and-white snaps showing little more than the rover’s wheels and a low-angle view of the Mars desert at sunset, they’re thrilling to those of us who get unreasonably excited about space travel and interplanetary exploration.

Larger color images from other cameras are expected later in the week, when the rover’s mast, which carries high-resolution cameras, will be deployed.

Due to the high levels of curiosity around Curiosity, the NASA gallery has been up and down a bit this morning, so we’re sharing some of the images from the planet’s surface with you here. To see the full 40-slide gallery with smaller images, you can head over to NASA.gov.

All images courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.