mars

NASA is offering a first video glimpse of the Curiosity rover's arrival on Mars.

The space agency last night released a modest stop-motion video built from 297 still-image frames captured by Curiosity's Mars Descent Imager, aka MARDI, which is mounted on the underside of the rover. The landing sequence, which finishes quickly in only about 40 seconds, provides a record of the last two-and-a-half minutes of the spacecraft's descent.

In the first few seconds, you can see the heat shield, 15 feet in diameter, falling away after separation from the 1-ton rover, which itself was slung below … Read more

If processor power were all that mattered in the space race, your iPhone 4S would be about ready to land on Pluto as part of a mission to send Siri to console it following its demotion from planet to just another big, cold rock floating in space.

F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen pointed out earlier today that the onboard computer specs in NASA's Mars Curiosity rover look pretty sad when stacked up against your basic smartphone, at least on paper.

An Apple A5 processor running at 800MHz is fully four times more powerful than the 200MHz chip aboard Curiosity. The 512MB of RAM on the iPhone 4S doubles what Curiosity packs, and if you've got 64GB on your phone, that's 32 times better than the rover.… Read more

Monday's top tech headlines are landing safely on your Earthly screens:

The Apple v. Samsung courtroom drama continues this week. The rundown: Apple says Samsung copied the iPhone and iPad. Samsung says it's just being competitive, and has also counter sued for patent infringement. Monday, Apple made the argument that Samsung's icons look the same as Apple's icons. What do you think?

The first week of Apple testimony revealed interesting tidbits, such as how executives liked the idea of a 7-inch iPad. We also learned that the iPhone was first called Project Purple and that it … Read more

Coming off the tremendous success of completing the "seven minutes of terror," the Mars Curiosity rover will now spend the next several weeks getting settled before embarking on its data-collecting two-year mission. So what does a solitary rover in a Mars crater do during its downtime? Chat it up on Twitter with its peeps back home, of course.

Earlier today, the official Sesame Street Twitter account sent a shout-out to the rover on Twitter, amusingly suggesting the children's entertainment company hoped to see its famous fictional Martian Yip Yips characters emerge on camera during the latest ground pictures from Mars.

Curiosity rover quickly tweeted back: "Science is cool. Yip-yip-yip-yip... Uh-huh. Uh-huh. #STEM #MSL" (Even BoingBoing served up a satirical screenshot wonderfully Photoshopped of what a Yip Yip on Mars would look like; see our own vision at right.) … Read more

PASADENA, Calif.--The nuclear-powered Curiosity Mars rover survived its nail-biting plunge to a pinpoint landing on the floor of Gale Crater in remarkably good shape, engineers said Monday, setting down on a flat, wind-swept plain littered with uniform gravel-like rocks and firm soil.

In a low-resolution view from a hazard avoidance camera on Curiosity's back fender, the rim of Gale Crater can be seen some 12 miles away to the northwest, while a fish-eye view from a front hazcam shows Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high mound of layered rocks to the southeast that the rover will attempt to climb later … Read more

In our twisted pop geek culture, it's not cutting-edge technology until it's been replicated with the most simplistic of child's toys. With that in mind, congrats are due to NASA's Curiosity rover, which has finally been reduced to a scale model made of Legos. Oh yea, the full-size rover also landed on Mars yesterday. … Read more

After its triumphant touchdown on Mars last night, it would be tempting to think that NASA's Curiosity rover is a complete success.

But while the part of the mission involving sending the one-ton rover on its 352 million journey to Mars ended in worldwide celebration, the real work hasn't even gotten started.

Over the coming weeks and months, NASA scientists have to ensure that everything on Curiosity is in working order, and only then will the rover take its first "baby steps," let alone begin to explore the many square kilometers of Martian terrain it was … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Sol Republic introduces headphones for cats.

- Digipacking: what to put on your emergency flash drive.

- Literally the worst word on the planet.

- How to use psychological tactics to avoid strangers on the bus.

- eBay testing same-day delivery service for iOS called eBay now.

- One percenter turns home theater into Nolan's Batcave.… Read more

If you have even the slightest interest in space exploration, you know the Mars Curiosity rover has successfully touched down on the Red Planet.

Watching online videos doesn't do the mighty space explorer justice. To put it in perspective, Ford put together an infographic comparing the Rover with a 2013 F-150 SVT Raptor.

Let's just say the truck wouldn't stand a chance in the harsh conditions of Mars, but the Ford does have certain advantages. At $43,970, the Raptor is kind of expensive, but the Rover Curiosity mission has racked up a $2.5 billion bill. That's equivalent to 56,857 of the fancy trucks.… Read more