NASA's Perseverance rover just landed on the Martian surface, and it has already sent home its first two images.

The rover landed on the Red Planet on Thursday (Feb. 18) after an unfathomably fast plunge through the atmosphere, followed by a rapid deceleration thanks to a never-before used skycrane. The skycrane then guided the robotic laboratory the remaining 65 feet (20 m) to the surface using cables.

The photos come from the big machine's hazard-sensing "hazcams," which make up an array of six lenses for stereo vision on the front and back of the rover. The first image, above, comes from one of the front hazcams, and the second image, below, comes from one of the rear hazcams. The hazcams have dust covers on them, so the images are lower quality than those that should eventually come from the rover's 15 other cameras. Together, they make up the first images ever sent to Earth from within Jezero Crater.

Perseverance has additional cameras mounted on its head and arm and a camera to observe the samples it collects in its cache. During landing, four additional cameras recorded the descent from different perspectives, and the full movie should upload to Earth in the coming days.

All of this imaging technology has a purpose: to enable the rover to make its way, under supervision from NASA, around Jezero Crater and examine the ancient rocks and river delta remnants there for signs of ancient microbial life. It's possible that one of these cameras will eventually beam home an image of the sample that contains the first strong signature of ancient life ever detected on Mars.

Originally published on Live Science.

PASADENA, Calif.—  And just like that, it was gone.

NASA received its last data transmission from the Cassini spacecraft at 4:55:46 a.m. PDT (7:55:46 a.m. EDT, 1146 GMT) today (Sept. 15), before losing contact with the probe as it hurtled into Saturn's atmosphere. It was a fiery grand finale   for the probe, which spent 13 years orbiting the ringed planet. NASA officials expect that Cassini broke apart about 45 seconds after that final transmission, due to the intense friction and heat generated by the fall.

"I hope you're all ... deeply proud of this amazing accomplishment," Earl Maize, the Cassini program manager, said to the mission team after the spacecraft signal was lost. "Congratulations to you all. This has been an incredible mission, an incredible spacecraft, and you're all an incredible team. I'm going to call this the end of mission." [Cassini's Last-Ever Photos Come Down to Earth] 

The final stream of data from Cassini was received at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in southern California. The spacecraft communicated with Earth via the Deep Space Network, a series of telescopes around the world that keep contact with spacecraft that fly beyond the moon. The Deep Space Network is managed from JPL.

During Cassini's final moments, mission scientists and team members watched anxiously as data continued to come in from the spacecraft as it hurtled through Saturn's atmosphere. The signal was lost when Cassini could no longer keep its antenna pointed at Earth, due to the intense friction created by its fall through the atmosphere. Maize said he anticipated that the probe would completely break apart about 45 seconds later. The team members stood and applauded somberly when Maize announced end of mission. 

"This is a historic moment, and I think the mood reflects that," Morgan Cable, a research scientist at JPL, said of the event. "This is a celebration of an amazing mission and incredible legacy."

In Cassini's final months and days, scientists and the public alike have voiced their affection for the space probe and the incredible discoveries it made. 

"[I'm] feeling the love, if I may be so corny," Maize said when asked about the public outpouring. "It's just very heartening. Because it's part of what we try to do — to extend everybody out to Saturn. It's not [just for] scientists in the ivory tower; it's for humanity. And so for everybody to get on the ride … it is just phenomenal." [Cassini's Greatest Discoveries at Saturn]

Cassini's descent into Saturn was intentional. The spacecraft was rapidly running out of fuel, after spending nearly 20 years in space, and NASA scientists decided to make use of the mission's inevitable conclusion. By crashing into Saturn, Cassini had the opportunity to see what the planet's upper atmosphere is made of, and that's the data that the probe sent back to Earth during its final few moments of life. The probe took its last images of the Saturn system yesterday (Sept. 14), and transmitted those images back to Earth the same day, ahead of its plunge.

During its 13-year tenure at Saturn, Cassini captured breathtaking images of the ringed planet, revealing swirling storms and a hexagonal jet stream swirling around Saturn's north pole. The probe saw strange features in the planet's ring system, found evidence of meteors crashing through the rings in the past, and watched as the planet's many moons caused the rings to change and evolve.

The spacecraft discovered new moons around Saturn; the planet has 53 named moons and another nine unnamed moons, and there are many more small objects that might one day be confirmed as moons. Cassini found geysers erupting from the surface of the large, icy moon Enceladus. Further study of the geysers has since indicated that Enceladus' subsurface water ocean might have conditions suitable for life. Cassini revealed new details about the strange surface of the moon Titan, which is dotted with liquid methane lakes, rivers and oceans.

"We left the world informed but still wondering," Maize said during a news conference Wednesday (Sept. 13). "I could not ask for more."

The $3.26 billion Cassini-Huygens mission  — a joint effort by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency — launched in 1997 and arrived at the Saturn system in 2004. In 2005, the Huygens lander dropped onto the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, revealing the hidden world beneath its opaque, orange atmosphere. The Cassini orbiter's initial mission was meant to last until 2008 but was extended twice, stretching the spacecraft's life to 2017.

"One of the greatest legacies of the mission is not just the scientific discoveries it makes, and what you learn about, but the fact that you make discoveries that are so compelling that you have to go back," said Mike Watkins, director of JPL. "We will go back and fly through the geysers of Enceladus, we will go back and look at Titan, because the Cassini findings are just groundbreaking."

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

NASA challenged engineers to pack an entire satellite dish into a cereal box with Radar in a CubeSat (RainCube), a technology-demonstration mission scheduled for launch in 2017 that will measure rain and snowfall on Earth from space.

Until now, most satellite dishes have been parabolic, which means that bigger dishes led to better radio transmissions. But radio-frequency engineers have been known to call the forces guiding communications over the air "black magic" because of their complicated physics, NASA said in a statement — and new CubeSat technology must fit that magic into a new, tiny package.

CubeSats are spacecraft designed to be light, cheap and extremely small; most aren't much bigger than a cereal box. 

"It's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat," Nacer Chahat, a specialist in antenna design at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in the statement. "As space engineers, we usually have lots of volume, so building antennas packed into a small volume isn't something we're trained to do."

Chahat and his team worked with a CubeSat team on the design for RainCube, which is something like an umbrella stuffed into a jack-in-the-box, NASA said in the statement. When the cube opens, an antenna pops out and its ribs extend from a canister to spread out a golden mesh. The RainCube antenna has to be small enough to be crammed into a 1.5U container (1U, a CubeSat unit, is roughly equivalent to a 4-inch cubic box, or 10 x 10 x 10 cubic centimeters).

"Large, deployable antennas that can be stowed in a small volume are a key technology for radar missions," JPL's Eva Peral, principal investigator for RainCube, said in the statement. 

RainCube's antenna relies on the high-frequency Ka-band wavelength, a rare choice for current CubeSats. Besides working with smaller antennas, that wavelength allows for a large increase in data transfer over long distances because of its higher frequency, making it the perfect tool for telecommunications, NASA said in the statement.

While most CubeSats have been limited to simple studies in near-Earth orbit, RainCube's technology could help scientists eventually use CubeSats much farther away, reporting back from Mars or beyond. 

"To enable the next step in CubeSat evolution, you need this kind of technology," said JPL's Jonathan Sauder, mechanical engineer lead for the RainCube antenna.

Follow Kasandra Brabaw on Twitter @KassieBrabaw. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

It's a scary scenario: an asteroid headed for Earth, just four years away from slamming into our home planet. It may be too short a span to plan an asteroid-deflection mission, but it's long enough to present very different challenges from those of a more typical crisis, like a hurricane or earthquake.

NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came together Oct. 25 to plan a response to such a hypothetical event. In a "tabletop exercise," a kind of ongoing simulation, the two agencies tested how they would work together to evaluate the threat, prevent panic and protect as many people as possible from the deadly collision.

"It's not a matter of if, but when, we will deal with such a situation," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Science Mission Directorate's new associate administrator, said in a statement. "But unlike any other time in our history, we now have the ability to respond to an impact threat through continued observations, predictions, response planning and mitigation." [In Images: Potentially Dangerous Near-Earth Asteroids]

The exercise, held in El Segundo, California, brought together representatives from NASA, FEMA, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Department of Energy's national laboratories, the Air Force and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, JPL officials said in the statement. 

It was the third such exercise; previous ones had allowed for a deflection mission, but in this simulation, there was too little time for that type of response. 

"It is critical to exercise these kinds of low-probability but high-consequence disaster scenarios," FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said in the statement. "By working through our emergency response plans now, we will be better prepared if and when we need to respond to such an event."

The asteroid in this test scenario appeared to be between 300 and 800 feet (100 to 250 meters) long in the first simulated measurements the participants were given. At first, the probability of a 2020 impact was only 2 percent, but as the group continued to simulate tracking it over time and the fictional months went by, the impact probability rose to 65 percent — and then 100 percent, in May 2017. By November of that year, in the scenario, they found that it would hit across Southern California or nearby in the Pacific Ocean.

The research laboratories' scientists calculated the impact's footprint, the population that would be displaced, the effect on infrastructure and other data that would slowly become clear over such an asteroid's approach. That gave the participants the information they needed to plan for an evacuation process, and decide how to convey necessary information to the public in the most effective way over the course of the asteroid's approach (plus debunk dangerous misinformation and rumors).

"The high degree of initial uncertainty, coupled with the relatively long impact warning time, made this scenario unique and especially challenging for emergency managers," Leviticus A. Lewis, chief of FEMA's National Response Coordination Branch, said in the statement. "It's quite different from preparing for an event with a much shorter timeline, such as a hurricane."

NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, established in January, supervises NASA's efforts to track asteroids and other approaching near-Earth objects (NEOs) and coordinates its interactions with the other U.S. agencies that would deal with a potential impact and decide whether to try a deflection mission or coordinate an emergency response, as in this exercise. Europe has a similar NEO Coordination Centre in Italy.

"These exercises are invaluable for those of us in the asteroid science community responsible for engaging with FEMA on this natural hazard," NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson said in the statement. "We receive valuable feedback from emergency managers at these exercises about what information is critical for their decision making, and we take that into account when we exercise how we would provide information to FEMA about a predicted impact."

Although deflection wasn't an option for this training scenario, there is research into that area. For example, NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, which recently finished its first planning stages, is largely a sample-collection mission, to pull a boulder off an asteroid's side — but it is also slated to test out pulling the asteroid's orbit slightly off course using the spacecraft and sample's gravitational pull. 

Philip Lubin, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose laser propulsion system has been incorporated into the Breakthrough Starshot program to send a probe to neighbor star system Alpha Centauri, originally intended the system to zap and deflect incoming asteroids.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. 

A speedy trip across Alaska's vast, roadless tundra and tall mountains requires travel by air. The state has more private planes for each of its residents than any other state in the union.

Three NASA science missions traveled the Alaskan way this summer, soaring above Arctic sea ice, piloting over permafrost and gliding past mountain glaciers. The projects are tracking changes in the rapidly warming Arctic that are best monitored by air.

"We can't do everything with satellites," Tom Wagner, NASA's cryospheric sciences program manager, said during a media teleconference Tuesday (Sept. 16).

The Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) surveys permafrost two weeks out of every month in a C-23 Sherpa aircraft fitted with instruments that measure greenhouse gases. Huge areas of Alaska, Canada and northern Russia have permafrost, soil that remains frozen year round. But permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures, increasing as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in the past 30 years. As the soil thaws, carbon stored on ice for centuries escapes. [On Ice: Stunning Images of Canadian Arctic]

Permafrost holds 1,000 billion metric tons of carbon, said Chip Miller, CARVE principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And that carbon, once freed from the soil, can transform into climate-warming gases, such as methane and carbon dioxide. Scientists are tracking whether atmospheric levels of these gases are higher above permafrost than in other areas.

The interplay between melting ice and the atmosphere is also a focus for the new Arctic Radiation IceBridge Sea and Ice Experiment (ARISE). Launched this summer, the experiment measures how clouds help or hinder global warming above Arctic sea ice. Clouds reflect sunlight, cooling the Earth, but they can also trap heat radiating from the planet, boosting surface temperatures, said Bill Smith, principal investigator for ARISE at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. ARISE scientists plan to untangle this tricky relationship.

And as the researchers scan clouds and ice offshore Alaska, flying aboard a NASA C-130 Hercules aircraft, the agency's satellites will also spy on the same spots. The simultaneous collection of data will help improve Arctic satellite monitoring, Smith said.

Finally, NASA's long-running Operation IceBridge is monitoring the health of Alaska's glaciers. Twice a year, before and after the summer melt season, researchers scan up to 140 mountain glaciers with a plane-mounted laser altimeter. Two decades of data indicate glaciers in southern Alaska are losing ice, though not as rapidly as in West Antarctica, said Evan Burgess, a University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist and member of the IceBridge Alaska team.

In this state, mountain glaciers have retreated so far inland that little ice is left to cleave off into the water, he said. Alaska's glacial ice loss now comes from thinning, not from icebergs calving at the front of the glacier. "Most of their potential for catastrophic ice mass loss has already run its course," Burgess said.

Operation IceBridge is in its sixth year of monitoring changes in polar ice. The airborne mission fills a gap between two ice-tracking satellites.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

If you think robots need look like humans to be able to use human tools or rescue people in danger, then you don't know NASA's RoboSimian.

Created by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., RoboSimian is a strange four-legged machine that looks like an unholy cross between a spider and a chimp. The robot can walk on all fours, or fold in its hind legs and sit back on its wheeled haunches to wield its two dexterous arms.

RoboSimian was one of 16 robots that competed last month in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials in Homestead, Fla. The two-day competition was designed to test the robots' abilities to carry out basic disaster-relief tasks. [Photos: NASA RoboSimian Robot in Action]

Sixteen teams from five different countries took part in the contest, and the robots were evaluated based on their performance in eight physical challenges. These included driving a vehicle through a designated course; traversing across uneven terrain and piles of rubble; removing debris from a doorway; climbing an industrial ladder; retrieving and connecting a hose; opening three different types of doors; using tools to cut through drywall; and closing a series of valves to demonstrate dexterity. 

Most teams opted to work with two-legged humanoid robots, but JPL was joined by a few other teams in experimenting with different robotic designs, which included machines on four or six legs, and even one that rolled around on tracks like a tank.

RoboSimian's unique design made some tasks more difficult than others — driving a vehicle, for one — but its long, sturdy arms and deft hands helped the robot pick up valuable points in activities such as clearing away debris and turning valves.

The top eight teams that scored the most points at the Trials secured funding from DARPA, and will now move on to the Robotics Challenge Finals later this year. RoboSimian finished last month's event in fifth place, meaning the JPL team will have the chance to compete for the $2 million grand prize. A Japanese robotics team, called SCHAFT Inc., finished the Trials in first place.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge was created in response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown, in which a crippled Japanese nuclear plant leaked 300 tons of radioactive water into the ground after a devastating earthquake and tsunami struck the region.

"During the first 24 hours there, if [robots] had been able to go into the reactor buildings and vent the built-up gas that was accumulating inside the reactors, those explosions might have been prevented, and the disaster might not have been as severe," Gill Pratt, program manager of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, told reporters in a news briefing last month. "The tech we're trying to develop is to allow human beings and robots to work together, in environments that are too dangerous for human beings to go into themselves."

And while the robots who participated in the Trials are a slow-moving bunch, Pratt expects the DARPA challenge will help advance the field of robotics.

"DARPA has successfully used incentive-based Challenges over the past decade to attract innovators from around the world to develop leap-ahead technology capabilities," Pratt said. "The diverse participation in the DRC will reinforce the openness that the international science and technology community shares, and move us to a future in which capable disaster response robots can help us save lives and prevent loss."

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.

NASA is unveiling a new documentary film about the history of Mars exploration today (Jan. 23) to an audience in the Los Angeles area, and there's a chance the movie could eventually get distributed nationally.

"The Changing Face of Mars" premieres tonight at 8 p.m. PST at the California Institute of Technology's Beckman Auditorium in Pasadena. Admission is free, with seating on a first-come, first-served basis.

The 90-minute documentary, which was produced by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), chronicles humanity's efforts to explore the Red Planet, from the first flyby in 1965 by NASA's Mariner 4 probe to the current work being done on the Martian surface by the agency's car-size Curiosity rover.

Reminders of those two bookend missions will be on display at the premiere, which will feature a full-scale Curiosity replica and the historic "first image" of Mars — a hand-drawn color portrait put together in 1965 using data beamed home by Mariner 4.

One aim of "The Changing Face of Mars" is to highlight and preserve the contributions of the 1960s-era pioneers, who blazed a trail to the Red Planet that engineers at NASA and other space agencies are still following today.

"They didn't know how to build a spacecraft; it had never been done before. There was no one they could turn to to ask how to build a spacecraft," said writer/director/producer Blaine Baggett, who heads JPL's office of communication and education.

"So I just have a tremendous respect and appreciation for those who came before, and I'm bound and determined to capture their memories and experiences so we have them, before they're lost for good," Baggett told SPACE.com.

"The Changing Face of Mars" is the fourth installment in Baggett's ongoing series "Beginnings of the Space Age." None of the titles are available nationally at the moment, though Baggett said discussions about a possible deal to distribute all four are underway.

Baggett hopes the series includes eight or nine films eventually.

"There are four or five more films, if I can last out and they keep me here that long," he said.

For more information and to watch a trailer of the film, visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/faceofmars/

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to Live Science. Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

NEW YORK — Humanity has made substantial progress in the hunt for near-Earth asteroids that could potentially pose a grave threat to the planet, NASA's chief space rock hunter said Monday (Jan. 14).

Don Yeomans, head of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, told a crowd here at the American Museum of Natural History that it is the smaller asteroids, not giant space rocks, that are difficult to spot.

"It’s unlikely that we'd miss a big one," said Yeomans, who has written a new book on near-Earth asteroids "Near Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us" (Princeton University Press 2013). “It’s the small ones that sneak up on us.”

Yeomans' office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is devoted to finding near-Earth objects (which includes asteroids and comets) and plotting their positions over time. A few of the more notable asteroids NASA has placed on the "cleared" list in the past year include such high profile space rocks as the asteroid Apophis, which will swing extremely close to Earth in 2029 and return in 2036. All told, astronomers have found 90 percent of the large asteroids whose orbits bring them close to our planet.

Apophis was cleared of concern last week when it made a distant flyby of Earth, which allowed astronomers to make new observations that helped complete rule out an impact threat in 2036. Previous observations had already ruled out the 2029 flyby. See Photos of Giant Asteroid Apophis]

In the near-future, as in this year, there will be other asteroids giving the Earth a close shave, said Yeomans.

On Feb. 15, the 164 foot (50 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass the Earth at a range of about 17,200 miles (27,680 kilometers), well inside the orbit of geosynchronous GPS navigation and communications satellites that fly about 22,370 miles (36,000 km) above the planet. Asteroid 2012 DA14 also poses no threat of impacting Earth during the flyby.

Yeomans and his colleagues can take close looks at near-Earth objects using advanced radar technology. By sending a beam in the general direction of an asteroid or comet, researchers can measure how long it takes for the beam to leave and then eventually be sent back, to the receiver. Scientists then analyze the reflected signal to determine exactly how far away an asteroid is and gain a sense of the its structure.

From there, NASA researchers enlist the help of amateur astronomers for follow-up observations to determine the orbit of a newfound asteroid, paying particular attention to how close the orbit track comes to the Earth.

"We observe where these objects are in the sky and project their orbits on years into the future," Yeomans said.

If Yeomans and his team did see an asteroid headed for the planet, there are a few courses of action available to them. Landing a small probe on the asteroid to nudge it slightly off course could be one way, while other have suggested impacting the crater with a probe that would drastically change its orbit, he said.

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to Live Science. You can follow SPACE.com staff writer Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

Fifty years ago today (Dec. 14), NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to the planet Venus, marking the first-ever flyby of another planet.

Mariner 2 zoomed to within 21,564 miles (34,675 kilometers) of Venus on Dec. 14, 1962, gathering a trove of data about Earth's hellishly hot sister planet. The probe took the first close-up measurements of Venus' scorching temperatures, for example, helping confirm scientists' suspicions that a runaway greenhouse effect had taken hold of the world.

Tracking Mariner 2's radio signals, researchers also calculated Venus' mass with unprecedented precision, NASA officials said.

The spacecraft's flyby also marked a proud moment for NASA and the United States, after a five-year stretch in which the Soviet Union had claimed all of the world's big space firsts. The Soviets successfully launched the first artificial satellite in 1957, sent a probe to the moon in 1959 and put the first human in space in 1961. [Video: Mariner 2's Venus Flyby]

"JPL has always attempted to do mighty things on behalf of NASA and our nation," Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which managed Mariner 2's mission, said in a statement. "Achieving America's first 'first in space' is among the lab's proudest achievements."

Mariner 2 had a bumpy ride. Shortly after launch on Aug. 27, 1962, an electrical short caused the probe's rocket to roll, rendering it unresponsive to guidance commands. But the short circuit mysteriously healed itself about a minute later, NASA officials said.

Things got dicey during Mariner 2's cruise to Venus, too. A solar panel on the spacecraft stopped working on two separate occasions, and attitude-controlling gyroscopes misbehaved. Further, the probe's temperature rose dramatically as it approached Venus, causing managers to worry that Mariner 2 might be cooked before it could complete its mission.

But Mariner 2 overcame all of this, and the rest is history. In addition to lifting Venus' veil, the spacecraft's observations also confirmed the existence of the solar wind and enabled scientists to refine the value of the astronomical unit — the distance from Earth to the sun, which is about 93 million miles (150 million km).

In the half-century after Mariner 2's close encounter, other spacecraft have further studied the second planet from the sun. The Soviet Union even landed a number of probes on Venus' surface, beginning with Venera 7 in 1970. But Mariner 2 will always have a special place in history.

"There will be other missions to Venus, but there will never be another first mission to Venus," Jack James of JPL, Mariner 2's project manager, said before his death in 2001.

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to Live Science.  Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

The mission controllers overseeing NASA's Mars rover Curiosity are finally switching back to working on Earth time after three months of operating in sync with the Red Planet, where days last 24 hours and 39 minutes.

The team in charge of Curiosity's instruments and operations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., had been working in shifts aligned with Martian time for the first 90 Mars days, or Sols, of the mission. Since the start of the Sol is always changing relative to Earth time, the team's start time for daily planning had to be moved a few hours later each week.

A constantly shifting schedule that includes overnight hours can produce effects similar to chronic jet lag, seriously disrupting an Earthling's 24-hour internal body clock. But NASA officials announced that mission managers were able to compress the daily planning process so that this week the team at JPL started working between 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. PST.

"People are glad to be going off Mars time," said Richard Cook, the rover's deputy project manager.

"The team has been successful in getting the duration of the daily planning process from more than 16 hours, during the initial weeks after landing, down to 12 hours. We've been getting better at operations," Cook added in a Nov. 6 statement.

In another change this week, visiting scientists who have spent some time at JPL since Curiosity's momentous landing on Aug. 5 are heading home. More than 200 non-JPL scientists who were in Pasadena to work on the mission will still participate regularly from their home institutions throughout North America and Europe, NASA officials said.

"The phase that we're completing, working together at one location, has been incredibly valuable for team-building and getting to know each other under the pressure of daily timelines," said Joy Crisp, Curiosity's deputy project scientist at JPL, in a statement. "We have reached the point where we can continue working together well without needing to have people living away from their homes."

Curiosity is set to spend at least two years on Mars to determine whether the planet could ever have had the conditions necessary to support life.

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

The California Institute of Technology will manage NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for at least five more years, the space agency has announced.

The $8.5 billion contract runs through Sept. 30, 2017, ensuring that Caltech will be at the helm when NASA's newest mission to Mars — a JPL-led lander called InSight — arrives at the Red Planet in 2016. The Pasadena-based university has managed the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1958, when the lab was transferred from military to NASA jurisdiction.

"We are very pleased to be continuing our partnership with NASA," Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau said in a statement announcing the deal Friday (Aug. 17). "Through this sustained collaboration, we ensure that JPL continues to be a national resource for space exploration, scientific leadership, technology and discovery, as well as an inspiration for young scientists and engineers."

JPL is NASA's lead center for unmanned planetary exploration, and it also manages NASA's Mars Exploration Program. The space agency currently has two orbiters observing the Red Planet from above and two robots active on its surface, including the 1-ton Curiosity rover, which landed on Aug. 5.

On Monday (Aug. 20), NASA announced that it aims to send another mission to Mars in 2016. InSight — short for Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — will drop a lander on the Red Planet in September of that year to probe whether Mars' core is liquid or solid, and why the planet's crust apparently isn't composed of shifting tectonic plates like Earth's is.

The $425 million InSight will be managed by JPL, as is Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission, which is formally known as the Mars Science Laboratory. MSL seeks to determine if Mars is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life.

Both Caltech and JPL are located in Pasadena. JPL director Charles Elachi also serves as a vice president of the university, and the Mars rover Curiosity's lead scientist is John Grotzinger, a Caltech professor.

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

The stark difference between daytime and night on the giant asteroid Vesta looms large in a new photo from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the massive space rock.

Dawn snapped the image of Vesta on July 18 from a distance of about 6,500 miles (10,500 kilometers) away, as it swooped across the asteroid's terminator — the boundary between the day and night sides.

In the photo, a large structure near Vesta's south pole that turned up in previous images can be seen in the center of the asteroid's illuminated portion. [Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA's Dawn Spacecraft]

When compared to the Dawn probe's first close-up photo of Vesta, which NASA released on July 18, the new photo reveals a better view of the asteroid's surface beneath the spacecraft in the shadow of night. The asteroid turns on its axis once every five hours and 20 minutes, scientists said.

Dawn entered orbit around Vesta on July 15, beginning a yearlong mission to orbit and study the asteroid. Vesta, which measures about 330 miles (530 km) across, is the second-largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is also the brightest asteroid in the solar system.

The Dawn spacecraft is expected to take detailed photos of Vesta and will closely study the huge space rock from three different orbits. Due to Vesta's large size, many astronomers classify it as a protoplanet, saying it would have continued to develop into a rocky planet like Earth or Mars if Jupiter's gravity had not wreaked havoc in the asteroid belt long ago.

NASA's $466 million Dawn mission is the first prolonged visit to a large asteroid. After spending a year at Vesta, Dawn will leave its orbit to travel to the asteroid Ceres, which at 590 miles (950 km) wide, is the largest body in the main asteroid belt. Ceres is so large that it is considered to be a dwarf planet.

Dawn is expected to reveal up-close views of Ceres, which should allow scientists to compare it to Vesta. Unlike the drier and more evolved Vesta, Ceres is considered to be more primitive and wet, possibly harboring water ice, researchers said.

Dawn's observations may help astronomers understand more about the early days of the solar system, as well as the process that formed and shaped rocky planets like Earth.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft launched in September 2007 and has since traveled more than 1.7 billion miles (2.7 billion km).

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