SciByte

lower elevation, shown in purple is the target landing area

scientists and engineers want to get the rover as close as they can to the big mountain, Mount Sharp

5.5 km above the crater floor

Sarah the cheetah has shattered the world record for the standing 100-meter dash, clocking a time of 5.95 seconds—making Olympian Usain Bolt's world record of 9.58 seconds look positively stodgy by comparison

USA Track & Field-certified course established by the Cincinnati Zoo, the 11-year-old cheetah was radar-timed at up to 61 miles (98 kilometers) an hour

National Geographic magazine

July 2012 the Féderation Equestre Internationale (FEI) lifted a ban on cloned horses and their progeny competing in the Olympic Games

cloning isn't easy, it isn't cheap, and there are no guarantees that the clone will match the talent of the original

cloning process can cost more than a hundred thousand U.S. dollars.

HOLOGRAPHIC OBSTACLES

100 riders are injured in eventing falls every year, and when a multimillion-dollar horse goes down, even a minor injury like a twisted ankle can end its career

Line-of-sight infrared beams could monitor the edges of the obstacles; if the horse breaks the beam, the system would instantly alert the judges—and the crowd—to the fault

The 500,000 lines of computer code went off without a glitch. The 76 onboard explosive devices popped off in sequence to the microsecond, throwing valves and cutting loose tether lines. So Curiosity rover's 7 minutes of terror had the happiest of endings. At 1:37 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, word came down: "Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars.

firing 76 pyrotechnic charges, dropping 150 kilograms of tungsten, deploying a massive parachute and being lowered to the planet’s surface from a rocket-powered sky crane

e $2.5 billion rover, probably the last mission of its size to launch in this decade

Communication is largely accomplished through relays to three satellites orbiting Mars or through the Deep Space Network, a system of giant interconnected antenna dishes in Madrid, Spain; Canberra, Australia; and the Mojave Desert.

By "sol 10" ("day 10"—each Martian solar day, known as a sol, is 24.66 hours long), all ten instruments should have been started up to see if they're working,

around sol 30 will the seven-foot [two-meter] robotic arm be tested

About 34 hours from the Mars rover Curiosity's landing

NASA brought us the latest weather forecast from the surface -- dry and cold, with a slight chance of dust

Earlier this week, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a dust storm south of Gale Crater, the rover's targeted landing site

High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance orbiter captured the Curiosity rover still connected to its 51-foot-wide (almost 16 meter) parachute as it descended towards its landing site at Gale Crater

one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape

working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken

The image scale is 13.2 inches (33.6 centimeters) per pixel

The parachute appears fully inflated and performing perfectly. Details in the parachute, such as the band gap at the edges and the central hole, are clearly seen. The cords connecting the parachute to the back shell cannot be seen, although they were seen in the image of NASA's Phoenix lander descending, perhaps due to the difference in lighting angles. The bright spot on the back shell containing Curiosity might be a specular reflection off of a shiny area. Curiosity was released from the back shell sometime after this image was acquired.

one of the first images taken by NASA's Curiosity rover

On the top left, part of the rover's power supply is visible

image is one-half of full resolution

HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen said before the landing that they expected only a 60% chance of success

MRO was 340 km away from Curiosity when the image was taken, and that is line of sight distance, said Malkovich. “HiRISE has taken over 120 pictures of Gale Crater in preparation for MSL’s mission, but I think this is the coolest one,” she said.

more details and image products will be available and we will post them as soon as they are available

flat, wind-swept plain in the middle ground is rimmed near the top center and right by the wall of Gale crater about 20 kilometers away

The uniform size of the small gravel at the surface suggests material carried from the crater rim by water rather than debris blown out of nearby smaller impact craters

wheel’s failure to dent the surface on landing shows the surface to be relatively hard. Scooping up the first soil sample may have to come elsewhere

A disabled toddler suffering from Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita (AMC)

thanks to the technology of 3-D printing, which enabled her to use a magical arms device to move freely for the first time.

3-D printed device is based on the Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX), an orthopedic apparatus made from hinged bars and resistance bands.

near the 35th anniversary of their launch

Researchers are eyeing three key parameters for signs that Voyager 1, which launched in 1977, has escaped into interstellar space

two of these three parameters are now changing faster than at any other time in the last seven years

a single day (July 28), the probe measured a 5-percent jump in the level of high-energy cosmic rays coming from outside our solar system, researchers

third key sign is the direction of the magnetic field, and scientists are eagerly analyzing the data to see whether that has, indeed, changed direction

Scientists expect that all three of these signs will have changed when Voyager 1 has crossed into interstellar space

preliminary analysis of the latest magnetic field data is expected to be available in the next month

Researchers recently spotted a previously unknown species of lacewing while randomly flipping through images posted on the online database Flickr

The images of the new lacewing, which has a 30-millimeter wingspan, were taken in a forested park north of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, by an amateur photographer and then posted online

entomologist randomly viewing the images

The insect-like vehicle, designed and built by engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, had made several flights attached to a crane before Thursday's attempted free-flight

Morpheus' engines, which burn liquid oxygen and methane, appeared to ignite as planned, lifting the 1,750-pound (794 kg) vehicle into the air. But a few seconds later, Morpheus rolled over on its side and plummeted to the ground.

An investigation is under way