NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars Arrives at Mountain Destination

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has finally reached the base of Mt. Sharp, the 3-mile-high mound in the middle of Gale Crater.

The rover reached its destination after wandering in the Martian desert for about 25 months. The arrival of the rover at Mt. Sharp t marks the start of the Mars Science Laboratory rover's original mission: to read the mountain's clay-rich lower layers like pages in a history book. It is expected that the analysis of these layers could expose the presence of life-affable environments on the Red Planet. A project scientist and Caltech geologist John Grotzinger said, "We have finally arrived at the far frontier that we have sought for so long."

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NASA radar system surveys Napa Valley quake area of Northern California

NASA scientists are planning to conduct an airborne survey of earthquake fault displacements in the Napa Valley area of Northern California, using a sophisticated radar system developed by NASA's Jet propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Pending results of a Thursday afternoon instrument checkout flight, a modified C-20A aircraft from NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center carrying JPL's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) was scheduled to fly a five-hour data-collection mission on Friday, Aug. 29 over the area that experienced a major quake during the pre-dawn hours on Sunday, Aug. 24.

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NASA's Next Giant Leap

The first humans who will step foot on Mars are walking the Earth today. It was 45 years ago that Neil Armstrong took the small step onto the surface of the moon that changed the course of history. The years that followed saw a Space Age of scientific, technological and human research, on which we have built the modern era. We stand on a new horizon, poised to take the next giant leap—deeper into the solar system. The Apollo missions blazed a path for human exploration to the moon and today we are extending that path to near-Earth asteroids, Mars and beyond.

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