NASA has a new rover in town, but this one won’t be leaving our atmosphere. Instead it’s going to Greenland to study the effects of this atmosphere on a giant piece of ice.

It’s called GROVER, and no, it isn’t blue or fuzzy (though, wouldn’t that be awesome?). Grover stands for Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Researcher and for now, it’s a prototype that will be treated like any rover intended for space. It was built by a team of students starting in 2010 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Grover is now at Boise State being “fine-tuned” before deployment.

It’s not a small guy either. Referenced as “tank-like,” Grover weighs 800 pounds and stands six feet tall. It is powered by two solar panels that sit on top of the rover in an upside-down V-shape. This is meant to capture both light from the sun and its reflection off the ice. Scientists hope to control Grover remotely from their desks, but they will first start out over a Wi-Fi connection, which must be accessed within a three-mile range. In the future, that will move to satellite, which will expand Grover’s range of travel and improve the timeliness of incoming data.

You’ll find GROVER in Greenland soon, checking whether a new layer of ice has built up since unusually high temperatures melted 97 percent of its surface in 2012.

But don’t worry, Grover won’t get lonely. A new rover built by students at Dartmouth College named Cool Robot will join the mission in June.

“GROVER is just like a spacecraft, but it has to operate on the ground,” Goddard Engineering Bootcamp manager Michael Comberiate said in NASA’s video on the rover. “It has to survive unattended for months in a hostile environment, with just a few commands to interrogate it and find out its status and give it some directions for how to accommodate situations it finds itself in.”

Grover image via NASA

Preparing to drill its first hole into a Martian rock, NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover tested its own strength by hammering a rock this weekend that may have once been under running water.

NASA outfitted Curiosity with its biggest drill yet, which actually only drills down 1 inch. The drill is an important part of the mission, so Curiosity must first test the tools to make sure they’re performing as expected in the Mars environment. The “pounding” seems successful, as NASA is moving forward with its drill plans.

Curiosity’s main mission is to discover anything that might support the idea that life can exist on Mars. The rover is stationed in an area that “shows many signs of past exposure to liquid water, including light-colored mineral veins that were apparently deposited by flower water long ago,” according to a blog post from NASA.

NASA also pointed out a tweet from Bobak Ferdowski (or as you may know him, that guy with the mohawk from the Jet Propulsion Lab) that read, “We tapped this rock on Mars with our drill. Keep it classy everyone.”

We caught up with Ferdowki and had the pleasure of interviewing him on camera at the 2012 Crunchies. He accepted the award for Best Technology Achievement, since Curiosity seems be a bit tied up at the moment. Ferdowski surprised us all when he said Curiosity is actually a lady! That is, NASA considers all of its rovers to be female.

Check the video for more insight on the Curiosity program. We have to apologize for the audio, though! It has some static-y parts:

Mars rock image via NASA

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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