{credit}NASA/JPL-Caltech{/credit}

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has made tracks, literally. The $2.5 billion probe, which researchers hope will answer questions about whether Mars could have supported life, sent back this picture showing its first movement from the Red Planet yesterday. After taking 16 minutes to perform what NASA calls “combined forward, turn and reverse segments” the laser-armed rover ended up 6 metres from where it landed. You can see a video simulation of its test drive here. The rover’s first proper drive in a few days will see it head for a spot some 400 metres east.

“We have a fully functioning mobility system with lots of amazing exploration ahead,” says Matt Heverly, NASA’s head driver for Curiosity.

Still possessed by Curiosity? Check out Nature’s special page on the vehicle and the video below.

It wasn’t a drive-by shooting, because the rover hasn’t moved an inch yet. But that’s about to change. On 19 August, the Mars Curiosity rover tested out the laser on its ChemCam instrument for the first time. The laser fired 30 pulses within 10 seconds at a fist-sized rock nicknamed Coronation (pictured), and a camera recorded the spectra of the induced sparks.

“Eep,” said the rock, according to its Twitter feed.

Testing out the ChemCam was one of the final instrument checks before Curiosity warms up its motors and makes way for an intriguing triple point about 400 metres away. On 17 August, project scientist John Grotzinger announced that the rover would head to this spot, called Glenelg.

Below, check out a new Nature video, which describes the rover’s landing and first two weeks in Gale crater and includes interviews with Grotzinger and deputy project scientist Joy Crisp.

NASA will be landing on Mars again. Just weeks after the successful landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, NASA on Monday announced that it had selected a mission that in 2016 would land near the equator of Mars in order to listen to the tremors rumbling through the planet’s interior. The US$425-million mission, called InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) could expect to hear quakes as large as magnitude 4.5 or 5 in its two-year mission.

InSight beat out a mission to float on a hydrocarbon sea of Saturn’s moon Titan, and a mission that would have hopped on the surface of a comet. All three were “very compelling”, says NASA science chief John Grunsfeld. “The only disappointing thing is we can’t select them all to go on,” he says.

A month ago, Nature profiled each of the three finalists in NASA’s low-cost Discovery competition, as well as explored the consequences of a slowing cadence of mission launches.

At the time, the principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told me that in spite of the long history of Mars exploration, only the surface had been scratched. There are multiple National Academies studies that point to the need to get below the surface, he says. “There’s been a consistent drumbeat for 35 years that we need to study the interior of Mars,” he says. The mission should greatly reduce the uncertainty bounds on the thickness of the Martian crust  — potentially illuminating how Mars, in its early history, differentiated into a core, mantle and crust. It could also set limits on the size and density of the Martian core  — which in turn could help to explain the history of the planet’s magnetic dynamo.

Banerdt pointed out the misconception that you needed an array of two or more seismometers to study tremors. With new seismological techniques, he says, a single lander is enough. The mission relies on the same basic spacecraft design used by the Phoenix lander mission in 2008.

Image: NASA/JPL

{credit}Harry Morton / NRAO{/credit}

Wanted: a responsible operator for a radio telescope, 110 metres wide. Rebuilt in 2000. Nestled in the scenic woods of West Virginia. Capable of measuring the pulsing heartbeat of collapsed stars with incredible precision.

The Green Bank Telescope (pictured) — the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world — is one of six facilities that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) will try to divest itself of, after a panel of astronomers on Thursday released its grim recommendations for how the NSF’s astronomy division should navigate gloomy budget scenarios.

The review panel found that, in order to pay for coveted future facilities like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, some of the agency’s older hardware should find new operators by 2017. The other telescopes are: the Mayall, the Wisconsin-Indian-Yale-NOAO (WIYN), the Kitt Peak 2.1-Metre, the Very Long Baseline Array and the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope.

“Something has to be displaced,” says Daniel Eisenstein, an astronomer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and chair of the 17-person panel.

NSF astronomy division director Jim Ulvestad points out that divestiture does not mean closure; he will try to find new operators for the facilities in the next 18 months. If no one steps up, only then would the NSF begin planning to close the telescopes.

Eisenstein says that the pain will also be felt by grant-seeking astronomers. Under the most pessimistic budget scenario, Ulvestad says that the panel’s recommendations would probably result in grant success rates dropping from an already historically low rate of 14% to between 10% and 12%.

{credit}NASA/JPL/Eric Hand{/credit}

It took 8 years and 34 kilometres of driving for the Opportunity rover to discover a vein of gypsum, deposited when hot, mineral-rich water coursed through rock fractures. Might the Curiosity rover have discovered something similar in the very act of landing?

A panorama of navigation camera images, retrieved on the rover’s third day on the surface, reveal that the retrorockets on the descent stage scoured out a shallow trench just a few metres from the rover. Clearly visible are two parallel, light-coloured, linear features. Could these be something like Opportunity’s veins? Project scientist John Grotzinger says that they could be fractures filled with some cementing material. “Sure, why not?” he said on Wednesday in a press briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The team will get a closer look as the main mast cameras are turned on and calibrated. The feature might even be close enough for the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to zap. And it is also a contender for a first short drive that is expected around the thirteenth Martian day — although some might want to avoid an area that was blasted with oxidized hydrazine propellant.

A few hundred metres further away lies a target that seems to be most exciting to the Mars scientists — a triple point between three different-looking deposits with scarps, or cuts, separating the units. The outcrops there might explain intriguing light-coloured deposits with high thermal inertia, which might be a clue that these deposits, too, have been cemented together in some way. Matt Golombek, project scientist for the Mars Pathfinder mission, says it’s a no-brainer: he would head to the triple point. “Why wouldn’t you go there? Those are outcrops. Why dink around with a little trench?”

Curiosity's heat shield drops away as the rover images its own descent to Mars{credit}NASA/JPL-Caltech{/credit}

What’s better than landing on Mars?  If you’re Michael Malin, head of the Mars Decent Imager (MARDI) on board NASA’s Curiosity rover, the answer is shooting video as you take the plunge.

At an 6 August press briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Malin proudly unveiled this preliminary look at what it’s like to be in the driver’s seat when touching down on another planet. Malin first imagined the camera that could do the job more than a decade ago, and he has been waiting to try it ever since.

MARDI is attached to the underside of Curiosity. As the rover drifted down on its parachute during yesterday’s landing, the camera switched on automatically just 6 seconds before heat-shield separation.

After a few frames of darkness, the video shows the protective shield falling away. Down below, the rover’s landing site looms ever closer, erupting in a cloud of disturbed dust when the rover is close enough to blast the surface with its descent stage rockets.

The rover is then enveloped by the maelstrom of swirling dust, which settles out to reveal the pebbled surface of Gale Crater, just inches below the now-stationary camera.

“I never though there would be so much dust,” says Malin, “but otherwise it was pretty much as expected.”

The video is not just a visual record of the rover’s descent. The detailed view it offers of the area immediately around the landing site will serve as a guide during Curiosity’s first month or so of exploration, when it will confine itself to short traverses within a fairly small area around its landing spot.

The individual frames of the video taken just before the dust started to billow “are much higher resolution than we could get from orbit,” says Malin, “so they’ll be useful during the early stage of the mission.”

Today’s first glimpse of the video is just a teaser made up of a few low-resolution stills strung together like stop-action animation. Over the coming days and weeks, all the higher-resolution frames that MARDI captured will be relayed back to Earth and assembled into a less jerky and far sharper video of the descent.