The robotic arm on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover had its first chance to stretch yesterday as NASA continues to check out the spacecraft prior to its first movement on the surface tomorrow.

The arm is seven feet long and has five joints that allow it to work with tools that include a camera, drill, spectrometer, and scoop.  It will be used to obtain samples to put into other instruments aboard the rover for analysis and to deposit other instruments on the surface.  NASA released this photo of the arm with its “turret” of instruments at the end.

Image credit not specified by JPL; available at JPL’s website.

Tomorrow, the rover will make its first movements on the surface.  It will move forward, turn to the right, and then back up, ending in a slightly different location and angled 90 degrees from its current position.   NASA scientists want to park it on a spot they have had a chance to examine with cameras.   The exercise should take about 30 minutes during which Curiosity will drive 3 meters (about 10 feet) forward — the length of the rover — turn, and drive back a little less than that. 

In April 2010, President Obama announced that the next destination for U.S. human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) will be a trip to an asteroid.  This week, NASA is simulating such a mission at Johnson Space Center (JSC).

The simulation is being conducted by NASA’s Research and Technology Studies (RATS) team,  Previous RATS exercises have been held in the Arizona desert, hence the nickname Desert RATS.   This year, however, NASA is conducting the simulation in Building 9 at JSC outside of Houston, TX because it has tools and simulators that would be difficult to transport to a desert location according to NASA.

Between the crane-based Active Response Gravity Offload System (ARGOS) that allows astronauts to experience the equivalent of 1/3 gravity (g) as on Mars or 1/6 g as on the Moon, and virtual reality helmets, the RATS team will test out living and working on a simulated human mission to an asteroid. 

Asteroids have virtually no gravity, a special concern since “loose samples could drift away and an astronaut could be propelled away from the surface just by hitting a rock with a hammer,” NASA reports.

The President specified a human mission to an asteroid by 2025 in his April 15, 2010 speech at Kennedy Space Center and in his 2010 National Space Policy issued a few months later.  The asteroid mission would be a stepping stone to sending people to orbit — but not land on — Mars in the 2030s.   The President said he expects humans to land on Mars in his lifetime, but was not more specific.

The humans-to-an-asteroid mission does not appear to have garnered much support, however, and many human spaceflight advocates continue to hope that the Moon will return as the next destination beyond LEO.   Landing on the Moon — or Mars — would require additional funding, though, since landing systems would be needed.   The program NASA Is pursuing today at the direction of Congress is to build a big rocket (the Space Launch System) and a crew capsule (Orion), but not landing systems.  With the money expected to be provided to NASA in the coming years, the first SLS test is in 2017 and its next flight, carrying a crew in an Orion capsule, will not take place for four more years.   Where the money would come from to build systems to enable a human lunar landing is an open question.

Meanwhile, NASA continues to follow Presidential direction in planning for an asteroid mission.

UPDATE:   This story has been updated to reflect comments made during NASA’s media teleconference today.

Fresh from the excitement of landing the Curisoity rover on Mars, NASA has selected another Mars lander as the next in its mid-sized Discovery series of planetary exploration missions.

Called InSight, for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (formerly named the Geophysical Monitoring Station — GEMS), the $425 million mission (in 2010 dollars, not including a launch vehicle) is a cooperative project with France and Germany.   Led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), InSight will be launched in 2016.  It is a lander that will study the interior of Mars and builds on technology used for NASA’s 2007 Mars Phoenix mission. 

The Mars exploration community was in a tizzy earlier this year when budget cuts caused NASA to withdraw from planned cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) on a series of Mars probes beginning with launches in 2016 and 2018.  They were part of a series of large “flagship” missions that eventually would have led to returning a sample of Mars to Earth.   The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) decided that the United States could not commit to a series of expensive Mars missions right now and cut NASA’s FY2013 budget request for planetary science by 20 percent.  

However, OMB permitted NASA to study an alternative, less expensive mission for launch in 2018 or 2020.  That study is ongoing.   The outcry from the Mars advocacy community was sufficient to cause the House and Senate appropriations committees to recommend restoring money for Mars exploration, although the final version of the FY2013 appropriations bill has not yet cleared Congress.

Probes can be sent to Mars every 26 months when Earth and Mars are aligned properly in their orbits.   The United States has sent probes to Mars at every opportunity since 1996, except for 2009.  That was the original launch date for the Curiosity mission, but it ran into technical problems and had to be delayed to 2011.  It landed on Mars two weeks ago after an eight month journey.

With InSight selected for the 2016 opportunity and planning underway for a 2018 mission, it may be that NASA continues to launch at every 26-month interval despite the constrained budgetary outlook.  The rest of the solar system, however, apparently will have to wait. The other two candidates for the Discovery selection were a mission to Saturn’s moon Titan and a mission to study comets.  The Titan Mare Explorer (TIME) envisioned floating a probe on one of Titan’s methane seas.  The Comet Hopper would have repeatedly landed a spacecraft on a comet to study how it changes as it interacts with the sun.

At a media teleconference today, NASA Associate Administrator for Science John Grunsfeld and NASA Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green said the three candidates were judged fairly equal in terms of the scientific knowledge they would obtain, but InSight was assessed to most likely meet the cost and schedule requirements.

Meanwhile, ESA is trying to save its 2016 ExoMars mission, with its new partner, Russia.  The mission continues to face financial hurdles.

NASA has released an “after” image of the Martian rock it zapped with a laser today showing a small hole created in the process.

Image credit:  NASA/Caltech-JPL/LANL/CNES/IRAP

The image is a composite incorporating an image taken by one of Curiosity’s Navigation Cameras before the test, with inserts taken by the ChemCam instrument afterwards.  The image in the circle is the before picture; the magnified area in the square is after the test.

The rock is designated N165, but has been christened Coronation by the Curiosity scientists.

NASA released this image of it earlier.  The fist-sized rock is about 10 feet from the rover.

Image credit:  NASA/Caltech-JPL/MSSS/LANL.

NASA tested the laser on the Mars Curiosity rover today, zapping rock N165 30 times in 10 seconds.  Scientists have now named the fist-sized rock “Coronation.”

Image credit: NASA/Caltech-JPL/MSSS/LANL

This image shows the rock prior to being zapped.  The point of the test is to study the ionized gas (plasma) that the laser excites to determine the rock’s properties using three spectrometers that also are part of the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument.  ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) reported that they received “a great spectrum…lots of signal” from Coronation. 

ChemCam was built by LANL in cooperation with the French space agency CNES and the French research agency CNRS.  The technique, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, has been used in extreme environments on Earth, such as inside nuclear reactors, but this is the first time it has been used elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA will hold two media teleconferences in the coming week to provide updates on Curiosity.  They are on August 21 and August 23, both at 10:00 am PT (1:00 pm ET).  Audio will be streamed at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio and http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl.  Visuals will be available at http://go.nasa.gov/curiositytelecon. 

NASA scientists announced today the destination for the Mars Curiosity rover’s first drive across the Mars terrain.  (Editor’s note:  the spelling of Glenelg has been corrected in this story.)

They have named the location Glenelg and it will be a short trip, about 400 meters from where the rover landed.  The top scientist for the mission, John Grotzinger, said the area is at the intersection of three kinds of terrain, which should yield a lot of data about the geology of Mars. 

Image credit:  NASA/Caltech-JPL/Univ. of Arizona

Before the rover heads over to Glenelg, NASA will check out its rock-zapping laser.  It will be targeted against a rock a little over 3 meters (10 feet) away and hit the rock 30 times in 10 seconds with 14 millijoules of energy. 

NASA is taking everything slowly but surely.   It did not specify exactly when Curiosity would hit the road, saying only it would be “in the coming days” as they first check each wheel, then move forward a bit and back a bit before setting out for Glenelg.   Curiosity has a 2-year primary mission, so there is no rush.

A reminder that you have only until tomorrow to share your views on NASA’s future with the National Research Council’s Committee on NASA’s Strategic Direction.

The committee is inviting public input to its deliberations through a survey posted on the NRC’s website.   Be sure to fill it out by close of business tomorrow, August 17, 2012. 

Editor’s Note:  In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of this NRC committee.

The Senate will be losing one of its key NASA proponents at the end of the year with the retirement of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX).  The question is whether it will be losing another as Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) fights a tough race to retain his seat.

Florida held its primary this week and Rep. Connie Mack IV won the Republican nod to challenge Nelson, who is running for a third term in the Senate.   So far the battle is shaping up along national lines with debates over Medicare and Social Security getting top billing, not the space program, as important as it is to the State of the Florida.

Nelson, who flew on the space shuttle in 1986 as a payload specialist when he was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, is an avid supporter of NASA’s human spaceflight program and of NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, the pilot of that shuttle mission.   Nelson and Hutchison crafted the 2010 NASA Authorization Act that reached a compromise with the Obama Administration on building a Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle to send humans beyond low Earth orbit in addition to the Administration’s desire to rely on commercial companies for crew space transportation to and from the International Space Station (ISS).   Nelson and Hutchison also are fervent ISS supporters.

Although there are other Senators with a strong interest in NASA, notably Senators Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Richard Shelby (R-AL), the Nelson-Hutchison team has been especially influential over the past three contentious years.    If Nelson wins his race, he will need a new partner in the Senate to support the vision for human spaceflight that he and Hutchison painted in the 2010 authorization bill.

Mack’s position on the space program is unclear.  He represents a district on the southwest Gulf Coast that includes Ft. Myers, far from Kennedy Space Center and the “space coast” on the Atlantic side of the State.  The list of issues on his website does not mention science or technology, much less space.  The son of former U.S. Senator Connie Mack III (R-FL — whom Nelson replaced after Mack retired), a former member of the Florida House of Representatives, a businessman, and the husband of Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), the only aspect of his official biography that may hint at what position he might take on the space program is that he “believes the private sector, and not the government, creates new jobs,” although that is a very generalized statement. 

Three NASA authorization bills have passed since he began serving in the House — in 2005, 2008 and 2010.

• There was no recorded vote on the 2005 NASA authorization act.
• The 2008 bill passed 409-15 and Mack was one of the 409 who voted aye (presumptive Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan was one of the 15 who voted nay).
• The 2010 bill passed 304-118 and Mack was one of the 118 who opposed it (as did Ryan).  

The 2010 bill was very controversial in the House and opposition to it was led by then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), chair of the Space and Aeronautics subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee.  The bill that passed the House was the one crafted by Nelson and Hutchison in the Senate.  The House committee had its own version, but time ran out for its consideration and the House decided to vote on the Senate version because, as then-House Science and Technology Committee Chair Bart Gordon (D-TN) said at the time, it was “better  to consider a flawed bill than no bill at all…”  Giffords disagreed, objecting particularly to the Space Launch System that was “designed not by our best engineers but by our colleagues over on the Senate side.”   She was able to convince 117 Members, including Mack, to vote with her in opposition, but that was not enough to defeat the bill.

The bill was a three-year authorization that runs through FY2013, which ends on September 30, 2013.   It is widely expected that Congress will consider a new NASA authorization bill next year.    Whether Nelson or Mack wins the Florida Senate race thus could make a considerable difference in what that bill might say.