NASA could soon be facing an awful choice. The agency, feeling a budgetary squeeze from Congress, might not be able to fund all its robotic planetary exploration missions after next year.

This year NASA received $16.9 billion, which may sound like a lot but, once adjusted for inflation, is roughly what the agency got back in 1986. Just $1.27 billion of that budget goes into funding all robotic exploration in the solar system. And most space policy experts don’t see that number going up anytime in the near future. In 2014, NASA will put many of its robotic missions through what’s known as a senior review. Administrators will have to decide which of its missions will yield the highest scientific return and may recommend canceling some of them.

“We have two very expensive flagship missions, Cassini and Curiosity,” said NASA’s planetary science director Jim Green, speaking to one of the agency’s advisory councils on Nov. 5. “So, this particular competition we’ll have to do very carefully.”

You wouldn’t think the Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn since 2004, was in trouble. It has lately been beaming back incredible data about the planet’s rings and moons. A recent image from the mission (above) showing Earth, Venus, and Mars from Saturn was widely shared on the internet and even landed on the front page of the New York Times last week.

More: Cassini vs. Curiosity: Who Will Suffer the Space Budget Axe? - Wired Science

Would we give this up for a few bucks? Srsly?

This is very obviously just a rock when you zoom in, but the usual ufo freaks are convinced it’s a lizard or a rat.

Rock, Rat, or Lizard? You decide.

more globaltimes.cn

Out of curiosity, how many of y’all know who I am in reality?

How many of you figured it out? (Wasn’t like I was hiding.)

How many of you do I already know under different names?

You don’t have to comment; just up-ding if you know who I am, and down-ding if you have no idea.

It’s an experiment.

SCIENCE!

[Video removed — I couldn’t get autostart / autoplay turned off so I edited out the actual video, please go to the link below to view.]

Curiosity Rover Gives Mars the Brush-Off

01.10.13

NASA’s Curiosity rover dusts off a rock on Mars for the first time.

More: Video: Curiosity Rover Gives Mars the Brush-Off - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Curiosity Rover Explores ‘Yellowknife Bay’ - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The sinuous rock feature in the lower center of this mosaic of images recorded by the NASA Mars rover Curiosity is called “Snake River.” The images in the mosaic were taken by Curiosity’s Navigation Camera during the 133rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (Dec. 20, 2012). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

After imaging during the holidays, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity resumed driving Jan. 3 and pulled within arm’s reach of a sinuous rock feature called “Snake River.”

Snake River is a thin curving line of darker rock cutting through flatter rocks and jutting above sand. Curiosity’s science team plans to get a closer look at it before proceeding to other nearby rocks.

“It’s one piece of the puzzle,” said the mission’s project scientist, John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It has a crosscutting relationship to the surrounding rock and appears to have formed after the deposition of the layer that it transects.”

The drive during the mission’s 147th Martian day, or sol, on the Red Planet took Curiosity about 10 feet (3 meters) northwestward and brought the mission’s total driving distance to 2,303 feet (702 meters). The rover is within a shallow depression called “Yellowknife Bay,” which is a flatter and lighter-toned type of terrain from what the mission crossed during its first four months inside Gale Crater.

During a holiday break for the rover team, Curiosity stayed at a location within Yellowknife Bay from which the rover took images of its surroundings. The team is evaluating possible first targets for use of Curiosity’s hammering drill in coming weeks. The drill will collect powdered samples from the interior of rocks for analysis by instruments inside the rover.

“We had no surprises over the holidays,” said the mission’s project manager, Richard Cook of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. “Now, Curiosity is back on the move. The area the rover is in looks good for our first drilling target.”

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

More information about Curiosity is online at jpl.nasa.gov , nasa.gov and mars.jpl.nasa.gov . You can follow the mission on Facebook at: facebook.com and on Twitter at: twitter.com .

Published on Dec 7, 2012

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover team wraps up its scientific study at Rocknest.

facebook.com … NASA Mars Rover “Curiosity” finds remnants of an ancient streambed on Martian surface. Curiosity science team member Sanjeev Gupta explains how rounded pebbles spotted by the rover are convincing evidence of an ancient streambed on Mars and William Dietrich explores the relationship between river fans found in California’s Death Valley on Earth and similar fans in Gale Crater on Mars.

NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named “Hottah” after Hottah Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories

Youtube Video

The Curiosity rover has returned another postcard from Mars, the first 360-degree color view from Gale Crater. (Aug. 9)

philly.com

Geophysicist Faye Flam wrote about the successful landing of the Mars Rover Curiosity on her blog, and received the following email from a parallel universe:

How comforting to know that $2.5 billion of our tax dollars are being wasted (sorry, ‘invested’) to find evidence of life of Mars. The critical clues will be traces of water. And we all know what that means. Just get yourself some carbon (and a few other things) and JUST ADD WATER, and voila, LIFE!
Silicon is the seventh most abundant element in the universe. The planet Mars apparently has a heavy dose of it. Should NASA then say that Mars has the ingredients for computer chips and laptops, with the intended implication that computer chips and laptops may have self-assembled on Mars in the past, or might in the future?
‘There’s almost unanimous agreement that Mars once had conditions suitable for life as we understand it, he said. If life never arose, he said, scientists will want to know why not.’
NASA wants to know why life did NOT arise on Mars? As if to say NASA knows why life DID arise on earth? Incredible!
Then, the finale. This unintentional but damning indictment of the evolutionists and origin-of-lifers and all of junk science: ‘Anderson said he won’t be disappointed if Curiosity fails to bring us any evidence of past life. “You have to be careful that you don’t confuse what you want to see with what you are seeing.”

Her response is great:

Hello. I’d like you to know your letter reached our universe with success. I’ve been particularly conscious of parallel universes in the last week since I started reading ‘Why the World Exists’ by Jim Holt. This book blends physics and philosophy to explore the question of existence. There’s much discussion of parallel universes in which the constants of nature and perhaps the very laws are different from ours.

Do you have philosophy in your universe? Is your universe apparently expanding? Ours is accelerating. Isn’t that the weirdest thing? And we’ve just confirmed that our space is pervaded by a Higgs field which gives elementary particles mass. What kinds of particles do you have in your corner of the mutliverse?

I’m intrigued that in your universe evolution is ‘junk science’. That’s mind-bending for us here on Earth because natural selection is such an elegant process, it’s hard to conceive of a universe in which life would emerge and not be subject to it. How does it work out your way?

Your universe seems to have quite the negative attitude toward space exploration. Where does that come from? Do you have other planets in your solar system? Do you have solar systems? You must at least have Google translate, since you message reached me in English, though I think you might have a few glitches. Anyway, nice to hear from you. Keep in touch.

NASA has released a low-resolution video that was taken by Curiosity during its landing yesterday. It’s actually a stop-motion animation of 220 images taken from one of the cameras. You can actually see the heat shield falling away as the craft approaches the surface, as well as the dust kicked up during the terminal phase of landing.

The space agency has also released its first image of Mount Sharp, the geological feature that NASA hopes Curiosity will be able to scale in coming months.