A downward-pointing camera on the front-left side of NASA's Curiosity rover will give adventure fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars. The Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will start recording high-resolution video about two minutes before landing in August 2012. Initial frames will glimpse the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover, revealing a swath of Martian terrain below illuminated in afternoon sunlight. The first scenes will cover ground several kilometers (a few miles) across. Successive images will close in and cover a smaller area each second. The full-color video will likely spin, then shake, as the Mars Science Laboratory mission's parachute, then its rocket-powered backpack, slow the rover's descent. The left-front wheel will pop into view when Curiosity extends its mobility and landing gear.

The Mars Descent Imager for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory took this image inside the Malin Space Science Systems clean room in San Diego, Calif., during calibration testing of the camera in June 2008. It shows the instrument's deputy principal investigator, Ken Edgett, holding a six-foot metal ruler that was used as a depth-of-field test target. The camera is focused at 7 meters (23 feet) so that everything between about 2 meters (7 feet) and infinity is in focus. This image shows a slightly out-of-focus rock (a rounded cobble of Icelandic basalt with tiny crystals and vesicles) at a distance of about 70 centimeters (2.3 feet), equivalent to the distance the camera will be from the ground after the rover has landed.

While NASA is counting on an act of Congress or a renegotiated deal with Russia to acquire plutonium for its next robotic deep space missions, the European Space Agency is considering alternative nuclear fuels to power its own probes traveling into the sun-starved outer solar system. NASA's dwindling supply of plutonium-238 nuclear fuel will not be sufficient to power an orbiter to visit Jupiter's moon Europa, NASA's contribution to a planned $4.5 billion joint flagship mission between the U.S. space agency and Europe. That's unless the U.S. Department of Energy, which supplies nuclear fuel for NASA missions, receives funding to restart domestic production of plutonium or successfully resolves a contract dispute with the Russian government, said Jim Adams, the deputy director of NASA's planetary science division.

Europe, a leader in nuclear power, has announced that it intends to lend its American counterparts a hand by making Pu-238 for NASA. David Southwood, ESA's director of science and robotic exploration, in an interview with Spaceflight Now, states, "Our target is to have an independent capability, which may help our American friends." Since the Pioneer and Voyager missions of the 1970s, NASA has been using the radioactive plutonium-238 (or Pu-238) isotope to power its deep space missions. The radioactive source has a very long half-life of 87.7 years. Over that period it slowly decays, releasing a steady stream of thermal energy in the process. That thermal energy is harvested by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) in the probes to make power. Unfortunately, NASA's plutonium stockpile has almost been exhausted, even as agency prepares its new Mars Space Laboratory which will require the isotope for power. There's really no alternative currently for NASA, as the operational range of many of its missions place it well outside the spatial volume where the sun's rays are strong enough to provide a decent level of solar power.

NASA's next Mars rover just got a new set of wheels and an innovative suspension system in preparation for its journey to the red planet. The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, a robot car is scheduled to launch in 2011 and reach Mars soil in August 2012. Each of its six new wheels is about 20 inches (about half a meter) in diameter. The ambitious rover is designed to collect samples and conduct tests on rocks across the Martian surface in order to dissect the planet's geological history.

The latest Mars robot may be dead, but NASA scientists have plenty to keep them busy as they scout out four potential stomping grounds for an ambitious new rover pegged to be the next red planet explorer. NASA declared the Phoenix Mars lander – its youngest Mars probe – officially dead in late May after photos taken of it from orbit revealed substantial damage from its environment in the Martian arctic. Those photos came from the same powerful orbiter that has been searching for the ultimate drop zone for NASA's new Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) which is currently set for a November 2011 launch. The new roving robot lab, known as Curiosity, is expected to determine whether Mars is or was ever habitable to microbial life. The rover's combination of technical improvements should make any potential landing sites more scientifically rich than anywhere Mars landers have gone before.

Engineers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are running diverse trials with a test version of the radar system that will enable NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission to put the Curiosity rover onto the Martian surface in August 2012. One set of tests conducted over a desert lakebed at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., in May 2010 used flights with a helicopter simulating specific descent paths anticipated for Martian sites. During the final stage of descent, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will use a "sky crane" maneuver to lower Curiosity on a bridle from the mission's rocket-powered descent stage. The descent stage will carry Curiosity's flight radar.

The life of a Mars rover is probably bit like that of Wall-E at the start of the Pixar movie: a lot of lonely treks in dutiful fulfillment of a mission through the remains of a planet's earlier days. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity may not be Hollywood icons, but they have done NASA proud. And in just the last day or so, Opportunity hit yet another milestone--it now holds the record for the longest active service on the surface of Mars, surpassing the mark of six years, 116 days (in Earth time) set by the Viking 1 lander, which arrived on the Red Planet in the summer of 1976.

Any proof that there’s life on Mars is still non-existent. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) agency of the U.S. government has made a statement to that effect in answer to the sensational article in the British tabloid newspaper “The Sun”, saying that the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have allegedly found a biological substance similar to a bog. It is really not very important whether purposefully or simply wrongly interpreting the NASA reports, the author of the publication in the daily tabloid newspaper “The Sun” deceived its readers. In any case, everybody, as before, is interested to know whether there is life on Mars. New arguments have appeared in the dispute over the presence of primitive life on Mars. Scientists have proved that there’re bacteria on the Earth, which can live under extreme conditions, similar to the conditions existing on Planet Mars. This provides us sufficient grounds to reconsider the results of the experiments, which denied the existence of life on Mars.

Imagine a focused laser beam that can evaporate rocks on a far-away planet. The stuff of science fiction, right? Well, not if you're a NASA scientist working on the newest martian rover being built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A full-scale model of the rover, about the size of a compact SUV, is on display at Seattle's Museum of Flight from May 4 until May 31, 2010.

If the next generation rover is able to take high-resolution color movies in 3-D on Mars, it will be thanks to the reigning king of 3-D cinema himself, "Avatar" director James Cameron. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory scaled back its plans in 2007 to mount such a camera atop the rover Curiosity, set to launch in 2011, after that next flagship mission to Mars came in consistently over budget and behind schedule. But Cameron lobbied hard for inclusion of a 3-D camera for the mission, taking his concerns directly to NASA administrator Charles Bolden in a one-on-one meeting in January. Cameron, whose film "Avatar" has brought in more money worldwide than the $2.3 billion Mars mission, convinced Bolden that a rover with a better set of eyes would help the public connect with the mission. "He actually was really open to the idea," Cameron said. "Our first meeting went very well." It went so well that Cameron convinced NASA to buy a 3-D camera for Curiosity. It will sit on top of the rover's mast - even though a mast camera, without 3-D capabilities, had already been built and was delivered to JPL this month.

While Bad Religion aren’t technically heading to outer space, the names of the band members, as well as the name of their record label, Epitaph Records, are going to Mars. Apparently, NASA astronaut Jerry Stoces is a big fan of the band, and according to the Epitaph blog, he listened to the group while training for his mission into space, going down next year on the Lynx spacecraft. Stoces also happens to be working on the next Mars Exploration Rover Mission and had the opportunity to add some names to a microchip that will be carried by the Curiosity rover, which goes to Mars next year. Naturally, he picked the dudes in Bad Religion and Epitaph Records as choices for Martians to understand English proper nouns.

Fill in your information and your name will be included with others on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011!

Mars rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity" were successful beyond NASA's wildest dreams. Now they're building a new, nuclear-powered Mini Cooper-sized rover to be lowered onto Mars by a hovering drop ship in 2013. Meet "Curiosity," the new Mars Science Laboratory.

It weighs almost a tonne, has cost more than $2bn and, in 2013, it will be lowered on to the surface of Mars with a landing system that has never been tried before. The Mars Science Laboratory will "revolutionise investigations in science on other planets", says Doug McCuistion, director of Nasa's Mars exploration programme. It will, he says, lay the foundations for future missions that will eventually bring pieces of the Red Planet back home to Earth. "The ability to put a metric tonne on the surface... gives us the capability to undertake sample collection," says Dr McCuistion. "To collect and launch samples back into orbit will require that size of a vehicle."