Four years ago today, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity made one of the most dramatic and harrowing landings in the history of space exploration.

On the night of Aug. 5, 2012, a rocket-powered "sky crane" lowered the car-size Curiosity onto Mars' red dirt using cables, then flew off and crash-landed intentionally a safe distance away.

Curiosity team members had modeled this novel technique repeatedly using computers, but it had never been tested fully here on Earth, let alone employed on the surface of another world. [Curiosity Team Highlights 4th Year on Mars.

Still, everything worked perfectly at crunch time, and Curiosity soon began exploring the interior of Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater. The discoveries came fast: The rover found that the area near its landing site harbored a lake-and-stream system long ago, showing that at least some parts of the Red Planet could have supported microbial life in the ancient past.

The main goal of the $2.5 billion Curiosity mission is to answer that very question.

"It was just an early home run that kind of took the pressure off, and allowed us to expand on that [discovery] for the next few years," Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California

Sharp-eyed readers will notice the name of this column has changed from Curiosity Watch to Mars Watch. Let me explain why.

For the past few years the column has focused on the activities of the Mars rover Curiosity. Because much of its current activities are routine day-to-day — I should say sol-to-sol — tasks of a field geologist, I am now broadening the column to cover activities of all the spacecraft at Mars — in orbit and on the surface.

We will still keep a close watch on Curiosity, but we will also keep watch on what the other Mars spacecraft are doing and discovering

First, what has Curiosity been doing recently? 

During the past two months, the rover has made its way around the northern edge of a couple of sand dunes. It will soon turn south and pass by the Murray Buttes. This southward turn will take the rover across the Bagnold dune field, which has blocked Curiosity’s path to the higher parts of Mount Sharp since it first landed.

The current westward travel has crossed a high-standing section of ridgy rock called Naukluft Plateau.

On the top of this plateau, the wind has carved the rocks into dramatic shapes. Driving over the rough terrain has been extremely difficult. To add to this difficulty, the rover has been fighting a recurring short in its power generator and has also lost some sols due to problems at the Deep Space Network.

Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. The short in this unit is not a new problem; it first occurred in November 2013. It has occurred a few times since then, but not often enough to be disruptive, just annoying. 

This short presents no hazard to the rover, but some of its operations, such as wheel steering, self check for unusual power behavior before starting. On April 3, 5, and 7, the short detection caused the rover to not execute the planned drive. Curiosity lost an entire week of activity. 

This problem has now been elevated from an intermittent annoyance to a real nuisance. Engineers are working on a solution.

The Deep Space Network, a system of large antennas on Earth, relays data between Mars and Earth. On March 24 a failure at the DSN prevented the rover team from receiving the images from the previous sol. 

This meant the team did not know the status after the drive, so it could not plan another drive or do any contact science. It could, however, perform untargeted remote sensing, so the sol was not a complete loss. 

On April 8 there was another DSN problem. This time it failed to uplink the rover’s command sequence. This equence was for two sols, so the contact science for both Mars days was lost. The DSN problems have yet to be resolved.

The difficult crossing is nearly complete. In the very near future, Curiosity will be off the Naukluft plateau and onto Murray rocks.

A UFO hunter and blogger claims that he has discovered a fossilized fish in one of the latest images sent back to Earth by NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars.

Scott C. Waring published an article on his blog, UFO Sightings Daily, on Thursday where he said that he found what appears to be a petrified fish lying on the Martian surface in a high-quality photograph recently released by NASA.

The image in question was captured using Curiosity's navigation camera on March 23 in the vicinity of SOL 1290.

Waring pointed out that the Martian fish looks to be half a meter long, which he said is about the size of a small salmon or a bass. Its fin ridge and tail fin are also visible on the photograph.

Waring added that image of the fish on Mars could serve as a proof that NASA's revelation of oceans on the Red Planet could very well be true.

"I do feel NASA went overboard with their 2 billion dollar fishing equipment to catch this one, but it's defiantly worth mounting on the wall," Waring said.

Fish Fossil

(Photo : NASA/JPL-Caltech )
This is not the first time strange objects were supposedly found on the Martian surface based on images recorded by the Curiosity Rover.

In November 2015, amateur astronomer Joe White posted a video on YouTube about a giant mouse that was photographed in Mars' Gale Crater.

Waring also wrote about a bear-like creature that was found by a fellow UFO hunter on another image of the Red Planet in October. He said that it proved the existence of living creatures on Mars.

Despite these assertions by UFO hunters, NASA said that it has yet to find concrete evidence of life forms on Mars. The space agency also denied that it is hiding such findings from the public.

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"There is no group that would be happier to see such a thing than the 500 scientists around the world who work on this Curiosity rover," Ashwin Vasavada, a member of NASA's Mars rover program, said.

"So far we haven't seen anything that is so obvious that it would be similar to what these claims are."

t’s an invitation the man’s who’s guided the Curiosity Rover will bring when he speaks Friday to an audience at SAIT.

“It’s a fun job and I hope my presence will inspire people to come do it,” said Heverly.

“We are always looking for good people and there’s a lot of work at the Jet Propulsion Lab.”

Nothing would probably be more enticing than simply hearing about the adventures the mobility systems engineer has lived through the 900-kg rover he’s piloted from up to 400 million km away at a California lab.

Heverly and his colleagues put together a list of commands that’s essentially emailed to the six-wheeled rover that’s then expected to carry them out.

It takes anywhere from five to 20 minutes for the orders to arrive on the dusty, rocky surface of the red planet.

“We customarily send a program every day to the rover that’s too far away to drive with a joy stick,” said Heverly, who commanded the vehicle for “a couple of years.

“You don’t sleep very well at night because you don’t know what the rover is going to encounter, sometimes it slips too much or goes over a rock.”

A recent NASA web posting states Curiosity traversed 28.5 metres of Martian terrain in 48 minutes.

While NASA’s Spirit Rover’s life has come to an end, Curiosity has outlived its three year limit and “has gone past its warranty,” said Heverly.

Guiding the bug-like vehicle across the vastness of space is a thrill like no other, said the mechanical engineer.

“With all the engineering constraints, to know we are commanding a robot on another planet, it’s an amazing job,” he said.

The height of the project’s achievement is nailing down the knowledge the evidence of water on Mars means the planet was habitable in its ancient past, said Heverly.

He’s now working on an unnamed exploratory vehicle to be launched towards Mars in 2020 and is confident a manned mission will one day embark for the planet.

His message to SAIT students, who can follow the rovers’ progress on NASA’s website: “We can all rise to challenges, we can all be Martian explorers.”