NASA's Curiosity Rover Finds Old Streambed on Mars

NASA's newest Mars rover has found evidence that a stream once ran vigorously across the area on the Red Planet where the rover is now driving. The finding is a different type of evidence for water on Mars than ever found before. Scientists are studying Curiosity's images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels. The sizes and shapes of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock are clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream's flow.

[Dreamcass]

I was feeling pretty proud of the human race until I looked at the comments section.

[trespire]

Some bloody good science returns. If this is an indication of the quality & detail information we can expect from Curiosity, this could well turn out to be a mile stone mission, really important to understanding our solar-system & the origins of life here & possibly in other systems.

[icurhuman]

Fascinating and exciting. I look forward to more discoveries with great eagerness as I know there will be much more.

[FastasGodCod]

The robot is still in it's initial phases of testing, as it will be for a while. It takes a great deal of time for information to travel from Mars to Earth, because of this, the teams are spending the 'bandwidth' on movement and testing instead of moving images. They change the color a bit to make it more relate-able so we can better distinguish the terrain. For a rotated camera image, Google 'Curiosity panorama'. These are composites of multiple images from a rotating camera.

[hwplugburz]

Finaly a new 1 :) Thx ( your 1 minute 30 sec newsreport just doesent cut it, and im to lazy to read all the sciense reports)

[Lastindependentthinker]

Excellent work. Curiosity is earning it's worth already.

[BigVtheVanity]

loving the video. good stuffs and good job NASA, you guys are the best.

[marianagavris]

EXCELENT de constructiv să avem asemenea știri bune.

[smokeybobca]

The rover doesn't have a camera on the end of its arm to take repetitive self photos of to post on facebook. There's a limited (very small) bandwidth between Curiosity and JPL and it's not wasted. This is called science.

[osmia]

I love this! Thank you so much for sharing!

[Leingod]

but to knowledge or information itself that we get from this mission is priceless

[voltcorp]

Yeah, I noticed. But I couldn't check if it was a problem of the video itself, or of the youtube resolution. Maybe you or someone with a HD capable machine could switch the gear thingie to 720p and tell us.

[ja]

Well that finding certainly improves everything for us here on Earth

[Thebakelite]

As others have said bandwidth is probably a priority, they don't exactly have a reliable 'always on' wi-fi type connection from the surface of mars, and they must prioritise what they use it for. No doubt there are other pictures, they have only showed those that support their hypothesis, so far. Others are sure to follow.

[TehMaxLightning]

Nice link. Out of curiosity ( ;) ), why don't they program it to make a HD video and send that back. I'm sure waiting a month for 10 second footage is reasonable. Or does it take longer than that?

[polfs]

thank u nasa, im 37 n i love all this exploration of other worlds, i was born after moon landings so i missed all the excitement of that. so im hooked on this, i hope to see a manned mission to mars in my lifetime, u got 40-50 years nasa... don't let me down. :-)
altho wud be nice if u changed yer name to something like 'The Earth Space Agency', im a european n i fink it may help bring people together.
N WHEN U FIND ALIENS PLEASE LET US KNOW!! ;-)

[xxKINGWOKxx]

Your team needs Sir William Murray to handle the phone lines. He keeps his callers in check.

[voltcorp]

Do you mean the actual resolution of the image feed, or the overall concept and production of the video?

[PacalB]

Polar temperatures on Mars are far too cold to melt water ice even in summer, you need to keep that in mind. Those caps do contain water ice, but also large quantities of more volatile frozen carbon dioxide (CO2), which sublimates, changes from solid to gas as temperatures rise. The water there is not in a liquid state with such low temperatures, down to −143 °C.

[hazyhalfmoon]

Ghost of "Briefings What an awesome title