Rover ‘prepares way for human mission to Mars’

Nasa has beamed back a set of spectacular pictures from Mars — and a first voice message — likening it to the lunar landmark led by Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon who died last week.

In the audio message, broadcast from the surface of the red planet by the Curiosity rover, Nasa administrator Charles Bolden forecast that a manned mission to Mars could happen “in the not too distant future”.

“Another small step has been taken extending the human presence beyond Earth,” said Nasa expert Dave Lavery, echoing Armstrong’s famous first words on the moon in 1969.

Experts at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California released more pictures taken by the $2.5bn (€1.9bn) rover, which landed at Gale Crater on the red planet on Aug 6.

One showed a panorama, in pin-sharp resolution showing individual rocks, of the landscape visible from the rover, including Mount Sharp, the slopes of which Curiosity plans to drive towards.

Mission chief scientist John Grotzinger said the landscape looked like “something that comes out of a John Ford movie”, referring to typical backdrop in films by the classic Western director. And he compared the tyre tracks made by Curiosity to images of the first footprints on the moon made by Armstrong, who died on Saturday.

“What we are seeing here is the results of tracks involving the first motions of the rover. I think instead of a human it’s a robot pretty much doing the same thing,” he said.

In a pre-recorded voice message, uploaded to the rover before being beamed back to Earth, Bolden said he was “speaking to you via the broadcast capabilities of the Curiosity rover which is now on the surface of Mars”.

“Since the beginning of time, humankind’s curiosity has led us to constantly seek new life new possibilities just beyond the horizon,” he said, adding that the rover “prepares the way for a human mission in the not too distant future”.

“This is an extraordinary achievement. Landing a rover on Mars is not easy. Others have tried. Only America has fully succeeded,” he said.

Irish stargazer finds second supernova

* An amateur astronomer has said he got the shock of his life when he made Ireland’s second discovery of a supernova in less than two years.

Dave Grennan, 41, was stargazing from his back garden in Raheny, north Dublin when he spotted the 123 million-year-old spectacle in the sky.

“I had the shock of my life. I was about to pack up and go to bed and the very last photo I took I downloaded and I nearly fell off my chair. I couldn’t believe it. I knew exactly what it was. It wasn’t a piece of dust on my camera, it was a supernova.”

The software developer, who works for CIÉ, discovered the first supernova from Ireland with the same powerful telescope in Sept 2010.

He said his latest find, on Aug 22, was a tribute to his hero, astronaut Neil Armstrong, who died on Saturday.

The star, formally designated 2012ej by the International Astronomical Union, was 100 times bigger than our sun and in the galaxy IC2166.