Tag: MARS

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... Google not only dominates the search engine traffic rankings, but the site -- with an overwhelming 69-percent share -- also apparently reigns as the "king of malware." [From: PC World] The Snuggie people are actually welcoming, and openly asking for, continued Internet mockery. The new Snuggie Choice Film Awards will bestow ...

Microsoft and NASA have teamed up to bring you and your humble desktop PC some of the highest-resolution images of Mars currently available. Using a combination of satellite imagery and elevation models, Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope project has created an impressively detailed 3-D map of the surface of the Red Planet. The interactive tour, which simulates flying through Martian canyons and ...

A group of 13-year-old scientists from Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, California recently discovered a hole in the roof of a Martian cave, only the second pit located near the Pavonis Mons volcano. Arizona State University's Mars Student Imaging Program lets students create science projects and commission cameras aboard the Mars Odyssey orbiter in order to snap shots of the Red Planet's ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. Designer Khoi Vinh picks apart Apple's claims about "perfect" typography on the new iPhone 4's 'Retina Display.' [From: Subtraction.com] The 2010 World Cup kicks off ...

King of the World James Cameron has simply become a force for 3-D. According to the AP, James Cameron fought for the inclusion of a 3-D camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, which launches next year. Cameron told the Pasadena Star-News, "[The scientists are] going to answer a lot of really important questions about the previous and potential future habitability of Mars." This is the second ...

When we finally do put humans on Mars, they'll face a major challenge: navigation. When we first poke around on the Moon, the astronauts never let the lander leave their sight. Considering the time and cost of a manned mission to Mars, however, our explorers will be expected to push further out from the landing zone. But, due to the Red Planet's lack of a strong magnetosphere, a compass would be ...

Eating five-year-old food doesn't sound too appetizing to us. But to the astronauts that NASA will eventually send to Mars, it'll taste as good as any five-star restaurant's fare. Well, maybe not that good, but it will be the sole sustenance for that group of men and women during their grueling trip into outer space. According to the Los Angeles Times, NASA will need to pack enough food to feed ...

"Hey, Mom and Dad, guess what I did today? I named NASA's newest Mars rover. Let's get ice cream." We're guessing that's the conversation 12-year-old Clara Ma had with her parents after the sixth-grade student from Sunflower Elementary School in Lenexa, Kansas won a nationwide contest to name the next Martian rover. Her contest-winning appellation? Curiosity. NASA has a history of naming its ...

While there's certainly no shortage of folks working on sending robots to Mars, there's also thankfully a few researchers focusing on making the trip a bit more bearable (and survivable) for us humans, and a group from a consortium of different institutions now say they've made some real progress on that front. Their idea is to use a portable "mini-magnetosphere," which would protect a ...

The first thing the news Mars lander Phoenix wanted to do when it reached the red planet was stretch its arm. (What do you typically do after a long flight?) This first step was hampered, though, by a radio communications glitch that delayed its activity for most of Tuesday. The glitch, however, was aboard the Reconnaissance, the Mars orbiter responsible for relaying data between the planet ...

Things are looking good for the Phoenix lander which touched down on Mars at 4:53pm on Sunday, May 25. The NASA nerds are reporting an almost perfect landing, with the spacebot tilted only one quarter of a degree. In fact, they're claiming that this landing was "far smoother than any simulation or test that was ever done." The lander's north-pole location is measured at -106 degrees Fahrenheit ...

We've reported on robots that fly, robots that spy, robots that teach, and even robots that kill. But, robots that are designed specifically for mountain climbing are a little new to us, so with that we bring you video of two robots designed specifically for the task of scaling sheer cliff walls. The first -- Capuchin --is a research bot, an evolution of earlier climbing bots created at Stanford ...

You've probably seen dust devils swirling about on a windy day. They're basically mini-tornadoes that form when turbulent air sucks up some dust or snow or other debris into a column. Usually they're only a few feet high, but sometimes they can be much, much larger. On Mars, apparently, they can apparently be several kilometers high, as attested by the above image captured by Spirit, one of ...

Landing on another world seems like an equally exhilarating and terrifying proposition. Exactly 38 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were probably shaking in their space boots saying to themselves "I hope this works," as they descended to the surface of the moon. Well if an article in Universe Today is to be believed, landing on Mars may be an even more terrifying endeavor. It ...