China to cut production of rare earths: Minerals

China will cut production of rare earths -- minerals vital for technology makers worldwide -- by 20%, a move that threatens to inflame trade tensions between Beijing and Washington.

Rare earths are 17 minerals with magnetic and conductive properties that are used in most of today's electronic devices, including flat-screen televisions, smart phones, hybrid cars and weapons. Nearly all of the world's supply of rare earths comes from China.

China changed production rules, which will close down one-third of the nation's 23 mines and about half of 99 smelting companies, Jia Yinsong, director of the ministry's rare earths office, told China Daily Wednesday

China implemented the rules to improve environmental conditions and help consolidate the industry, officials said. The new regulations boost the minimum annual output at mines to 20,000 metric tons and 2,000 tons per year for smelting operation -- a move which will weed out smaller operations.

The U.S., Japan and the European Union have complained to the World Trade Organization that China's rare earths export restrictions violate trade rules.

The minerals include cerium, neodymium, dysprosium, tungsten and molybdenum. Tungsten, for example, is used in electronics, automotive, aerospace and medical technologies. China produces 91% of the world's tungsten. Molybdenum is a metallic element used for filaments in light bulbs. China produces 36% of the world's molybdenum.

Rare earths are not actually "rare," and can be found in other countries - including the U.S. - but are difficult to mine safely. About a third of the world's rare earth deposits are in China but the country controls more than 90% of production, in part due to its lower labor costs and less stringent environmental regulations.

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word of thoughts today

“No man is greatly jealous who is not in some measure guilty. ”
— Benjamin Whichcote

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Mar rover curiosity has landed on Planet Mars

NASA's rover Curiosity successfully carried out a highly challenging landing on Mars early Monday, transmitting images back to Earth after traveling hundreds of millions of miles through space in order to explore the Red Planet.

The $2.6 billion Curiosity made its dramatic arrival on Martian terrain in a spectacle popularly known as the "seven minutes of terror."

This jaw-dropping landing process, involving a sky crane and the world's largest supersonic parachute, allowed the spacecraft carrying Curiosity to target the landing area that scientists had meticulously chosen.

The mission control in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California burst into cheers as the rover touched down. Team members hugged and high-fived one another as Curiosity beamed back the first pictures from the planet, some shed tears.

"The successful landing of Curiosity -- the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet -- marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future," President Barack Obama said in a statement congratulating the NASA employees who had worked on the project.

The scientific community reacted to the achievement with a mixture of elation and relief.

"Rationally I know it was supposed to work all along, but emotionally it always seemed completely crazy," said James Wray, assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, who is affiliated with the science team of Curiosity. "So to see all those steps being ticked off and actually working, it's a huge relief."

The initial images the SUV-sized rover sent back to Earth were black and white and grainy, but one showed its wheel resting on the stony ground and the vehicle's shadow appeared in another. Larger color images are expected later in the week, NASA said.

The spacecraft had been traveling away from Earth since November 26 on a journey of approximately 352 million miles (567 million kilometers), according to NASA.

Curiosity, which will be controlled from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has a full suite of sophisticated tools for exploring Mars. They include 17 cameras, a laser that can survey the composition of rocks from a distance and instruments that can analyze samples from soil or rocks.

The aim of its work is "to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms," NASA says.

Curiosity's first stop is Gale Crater, which may have once contained a lake. After at least a year, the rover will arrive at Mount Sharp, in the center of the crater. The rover will drive up the mountain examining layers of sediment. This process is like looking at a historical record because each layer represents an era of the planet's history, scientists say.

The phenomenon of sedimentary layers is remarkably similar to what is seen on Earth, in California's Death Valley or in Montana's Glacier National Park, says John Grotzinger, chief scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Rocks and minerals found on Earth are different than on Mars, but the idea of a mountain made of layers is familiar to scientists. Unlike on Earth, however, Mars has no plate tectonics, so the Martian layers are flat and not disrupted as they would be on Earth. That also means that Mount Sharp was formed in a different way than how mountains are created on Earth -- no one knows how.

In these layers, scientists are looking for organic molecules, which are necessary to create life. But even if Curiosity finds them, that's not proof that life existed -- after all, these molecules are found in bus exhaust and meteorites, too, says Steve Squyres, part of the Mars Science Laboratory science team.

If there aren't any organics, that may suggest there's something on the planet destroying these molecules, said Wray, of Georgia Tech. But if Curiosity detects them, Wray said, that might help scientists move from asking, "Was Mars ever habitable?" to "Did Mars actually host life?"

Curiosity's mission is also significant in an era when NASA's budgets are shrinking and China is becoming more ambitious in its space exploration program.

"I feel like it's a signal that we have the capability to do big and exciting things in the future." said Carol Paty, assistant professor at Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "You can't not be excited."

Liquid water is not something scientists expect to be apparent on Mars because the planet is so cold and dry, Squyres said. If the planet does harbor liquid water today, it would have to be deep below the surface, perhaps peeking out in a few special places, but not likely to be seen by Curiosity, Squyres said.

It's hard to know how long ago liquid water would have been there because there's no mechanism to date the rocks that rovers find on Mars, Squyres said.

Evidence from the spacecraft NASA has sent to Mars so far suggests that the "warm and wet" period on Mars lasted for the first billion years of the planet's history.

"In order to create life, you need both the right environmental conditions -- which includes liquid water -- and you need the building blocks from which life is built, which includes organics," Squyres said. The Mars Science Laboratory is a precursor mission to sharper technology that could do life detection, Grotzinger said.

There aren't specific molecules that scientists are looking for with Curiosity. The attitude is: "Let's go to an interesting place with good tools and find out what's there," Squyres said.

Curiosity is supposed to last for two years on Mars, but it may operate longer -- after all, Spirit and Opportunity, which arrived on Mars in 2004, were each only supposed to last 90 Martian days. Spirit stopped communicating with NASA in 2010 after getting stuck in sand, and Opportunity is still going.

"You take what Mars gives you," said Squyres, also the lead scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, which includes Spirit and Opportunity. "If we knew what we were going to find, it wouldn't be this much fun."

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The man who will be driving mars rover 2012

On Earth, Scott Maxwell drives his red Prius without paying much attention to the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. He's lived in the same neighborhood of Pasadena for 18 years, after all.

When he's driving on Mars, though, every rock he encounters is a new discovery, a step toward humanity's knowledge of the planet he hopes to visit some day.

Maxwell has the dream job of driving rovers on Mars, and he's gearing up to take control of the biggest and most sophisticated one yet: Curiosity. He's one of about a dozen people at NASA tasked with steering the $2.6 billion vehicle from more than 100 million miles away.

"It's a priceless national asset that happens to be sitting on the surface of another planet," Maxwell says of the rover, which is set to land on Mars at 1:31 a.m. ET Monday. "You better take that damn seriously."

As a child, Scott Maxwell dreamed of visiting other planets; now he gets to drive rovers on Mars.

Maxwell loves to talk about how much he loves his job, and his effervescence is infectious, say colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home to Curiosity's mission control.

"The thing that always impressed me about Scott was just the passion that he has for what we're doing. He just loves being a rover driver," says Steve Squyers, a Mars expert who's worked closely with Maxwell. "He thinks he's got the coolest job on the planet, and he's right, I think."

The names of the rovers Maxwell has driven so far -- Spirit and Opportunity -- speak to his upbeat attitude and thirst for immersing himself in what he enjoys doing.

Through his blog and Twitter account @marsroverdriver, Maxwell interacts with all sorts of self-professed "rover-huggers" -- people who really love rovers.

Earlier this week Maxwell tweeted, "VIP seats for opening night of @IndyShakes's Comedy of Errors! Last chance to see a play before the baby comes Sunday."

The baby, of course, is the SUV-sized Curiosity, coming to Mars after years of planning and preparation. It's been more than eight months since it left Earth, and no one can be sure exactly how it will behave, says Maxwell.

Over dinner in Old Pasadena this week, Maxwell and his girlfriend, Kim Lichtenberg -- a planetary scientist also working on the rover mission -- playfully compared it to having a child, though neither has had children.

"We're all going to be kind of like new parents," Lichtenberg says.

"Watch it take its first steps," Maxwell adds.

Landing Curiosity will be such an amazing feat of engineering that NASA is billing the process "seven minutes of terror."

Like anxious parents, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are eager to see the rover arrive safely, and so are the reporters who have flooded the NASA campus.

Maxwell says he has confidence in the JPL team responsible for the entry, descent and landing of the spacecraft. But if the amazing maneuver goes wrong, the whole effort will have been "all for nothing" for the many people who've sacrificing family time and vacations to pour their hearts into it.

"That seven minutes tells you whether the last seven years of your life had a point," Maxwell says.

A voyage to break down the wall

Maxwell's eyes widen with joy when he talks about the parts of life he thinks are "awesome": His girlfriend. His other NASA team members. The Independent Shakespeare Company (@IndyShakes). His first lemon drop cocktail. The Cotswolds.

Something about Maxwell's thin frame, boyish features and the way he gets giddy over esoteric things resembles Jim Parsons' character on "The Big Bang Theory," although Maxwell is more jovial and socially gracious than Sheldon Cooper. His arms seem almost impossibly long as they move about while he explains the rover driving process.

NASA reveals panoramic view of Mars

With a youthful complexion and hair that finishes in a short tail on the back of his neck, it's impossible to guess Maxwell is 41. The first time he ever had lunch with Lichtenberg, she thought, "Aw man, he's way too young for me. Way too young for me." Later she found out she's about six years his junior.

Lichtenberg, fair and blond, grew up with the space program close at hand: Her father is astronaut Byron Lichtenberg, a NASA payload specialist who's flown on two shuttle missions. She has a Ph.D. in planetary spectroscopy, which deals with the interaction of matter and radiation in planetary environments.

Maxwell, on the other hand, had long assumed that a career in space was out of reach.

He was raised in an economically depressed rural area of eastern North Carolina, although his accent could just as well place him from the Midwest. His parents divorced when he was 7; after his mother moved to Florida, he spent time bouncing between the two states until college.

His father was a railroad engineer for most of his career, although he previously worked as a dean at various colleges.

Carl Sagan was Maxwell's childhood hero. He adored watching the 13-part TV series Sagan hosted called "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," first broadcast in 1980 on PBS.

In one episode, the scientist talked about what it would be like to go to Mars. Only last year, Maxwell watched the episode again and remembered it mentioned a prototype Mars rover, which at that time seemed a futuristic idea.

"I realized in that moment that that's where I get this sense that I've grown up and stepped into this fantasy world that I had when I was a kid, because I have," he says with excited emphasis.

As a child, Maxwell loved imagining what it would be like to go to other planets. But as an older teen, he assumed he would study hard and end up in a career that seemed more common and attainable than space exploration, such as banking.

"This kind of thing always seemed to me like the kind of thing other people do," he said. "There's me. And there's this big invisible glass wall. And there are people who are doing stuff like that."

Maxwell believed he could never cross over to the other side of glass wall.

Mission Control for Curiosity at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

It wasn't until he got hired by NASA, after completing his master's degree in computer science, that he realized the wall never existed.

Maxwell is living his fantasy now, but he hasn't always had such luck. At age 20, while double-majoring in English and computer science at East Carolina University, he learned that his swollen lymph nodes were a symptom of stage 2 Hodgkin's lymphoma. The cancer had spread in his neck and chest. He went through nine weeks of radiation treatments and has been cancer-free ever since.

Just days after the treatments ended, he left for graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Going from a state school to a prestigious engineering institution, he was floored on the first day when a professor expected everyone to have already learned the material in the first six chapters of an algorithms textbook. Maxwell had to quickly catch up on his own but says he loved learning so much at once.

And though he feared he couldn't afford his master's degree, he found work with the research and development arm of the U.S. Army and left school debt-free.

He had intended to go to Illinois to work toward a Ph.D., but ultimately the cancer changed his priorities.

"I was interested in going out and making tools for people to use," he says.

JPL came to recruit at his school in fall 1993, and he remembers telling the recruiter how he was fascinated by NASA's Voyager mission -- twin spacecraft that had photographed Jupiter in unprecedented detail. His excitement apparently made an impression: He landed an interview at JPL in January 1994, and started his job that June.

Today, he lives on a quiet Pasadena street, in a cozy house that boasts some of his nerdy treasures, including an extensive collection of science fiction books. "But then my life became science fiction," he said, explaining why he's reading more Shakespeare and Dickens these days. As he shows off his collection, his cat Molly purrs, demanding his attention. The brown and black marbling on her otherwise white fur looks somewhat like the Martian landscape, although that's not why he adopted her.

A glass-paneled cabinet hosts metallic "Star Wars" and Mars rover lunch boxes. There's a vial of a substance he calls KimSim, a material his girlfriend helped create to figure out how to rescue the Spirit rover after it got stuck in a "sand trap" of alien soil on Mars in 2009.

And there are stones from the Cotswolds, an area in England he bubbles with excitement over. He says, "Wait, wait," like a child about to demonstrate a new toy, and runs to get a book filled with images of the region. He likes the views from the ground better than the aerial shots -- ground-level is more like what a rover would see, he explains.

The wider, well-manicured street perpendicular to his own, with larger houses and roses growing on front lawns, is the sort of place where he'd always wanted to live, but he says the houses are "wicked, ridiculous, crazy expensive." Still, he loves the house he bought, with the added bonus of a lemon tree growing at its side.

It's a bit like how he loves his job driving a vehicle on Mars, even though he dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

"Things in my life aren't quite how I pictured them," he said, "but they rhyme."

At NASA, not just a sojourner

It's been 18 years, but Maxwell still occasionally interrupts himself to say things like "I can't get over that I work at a place called the Spacecraft Assembly Facility" when he mentions that building at JPL.

James Wang, test conductor for Curiosity, with the test model of the rover used for experiments on Earth.

For the first couple of months there, Maxwell felt like he was in a foreign country where he didn't speak the language. He says it was fun to be clueless about the acronyms his colleagues were throwing around. "Now, I'll use 10 acronyms in a sentence and won't think twice about it," he says, "but you kind of have to pick up the culture."

He started out working on software to decode data from spacecraft. He also wrote software to help coordinate various teams working around the world to get commands to spacecraft.

In the mid-1990s, Maxwell was asked if he wanted to work on a mission called Mars Pathfinder. Maxwell had no idea what that was, and working on the team didn't appeal to him.

What he didn't know was that Mars Pathfinder would mark the first time NASA had sent an untethered robotic device to another planet. The 90-day mission was carried out by a rover named Sojourner.

"I just thought that was super cool, that really just captured my imagination, that you could go for a walk on another planet," he says. "Not with your squishy, frail, human body, but you could design a robot body that would go to Mars for you."

Although he passed up that opportunity, another chance came in 1999 when Brian Cooper, who'd driven Sojourner, approached Maxwell about developing rover-driving software for the next Mars mission.

"More or less before the words were out of his mouth -- like, 'Do you want to come work on this project?' -- I was like, "YES! Yes! I'd like to come work on this project, that'd be the coolest thing in the world, yes!"

That mission was eventually scrapped, but their efforts were put toward a different endeavor that did take off: Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars exploration rovers that launched in the summer of 2003.

Maxwell helped write the software that rover drivers would use for the pair, as well as for Curiosity. He would soon move from writing software to using it to command -- and ultimately drive -- the rovers.

His first time commanding a rover was on his 33rd birthday, in 2004. Spirit hadn't started moving across the Mars surface yet, but Maxwell and his colleague were checking out the instruments. Maxwell told the rover to ignore the state of a switch on one of the instruments -- not exactly driving, he said, "but by golly, I commanded a Mars rover that day."

The real drama came about three weeks later when he got behind the wheel, so to speak. He remembers obsessing over what he had to do, checking everything multiple times, before sending the driving instructions.

He remembers going home afterwards: "I'm lying there, looking at the ceiling, realizing there's a robot on another planet doing what I told it to. And that notion of, 'I'm getting to do this. I'm not dreaming about this anymore. It's real for me now.'

"I reach out across 100 million miles of emptiness and move something on the surface of another planet. That feeling has never left me."

The opportunity to drive

You might think a rover driver would control the vehicle using a joystick and virtual reality interface, much like a video game. That's not how it works. The reason for that: Signals take at least four minutes to travel from Earth to Mars (it could take up to 20 minutes, depending on where the planets are in their orbits), and then the same amount of time for confirmation data to come back.

So rover drivers don't tell the vehicle to move forward and then wait several minutes for confirmation that it happened before sending the next command. Instead, drivers spend their days writing directions for what the rover will do the next day, sometimes even a few days if it's a holiday weekend.

Maxwell and colleagues spend the Martian night generating a single batch of commands, which they send to the rover after the vehicle sees sunrise. Drivers work in overlapping 8- to 10-hour shifts preparing the rover for the day ahead. "It's as if we're e-mailing the rover its to-do list for the entire day," Maxwell explains. And at the end of its day, the rover sends information back saying what it did. During the Martian night, the rover goes to sleep.

That might sound risky, letting a vehicle roam around on a planet for several hours without someone guiding its every move in real time. But safety checks are built in. Curiosity will know how far its wheels are moving up and down, so it will stop if it heads into something deeper or higher than the drivers had planned. In that sense, the rover is more like a boat than a plane -- stopping is a fine course of action if additional direction is needed, Maxwell explains.

Curiosity can travel up to about 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) per minute, says rover driver John Wright, but in practice it will go a lot slower because the science team will want it to stop and examine its surroundings. A rover may stop and take photos, or -- as will be the case with Curiosity -- the scientists will want it to stop to perform chemical analyses.

Scott Maxwell wears 3-D glasses to simulate driving a Mars rover at JPL's Mission Operations area.

Photos the rover takes of its surroundings help the drivers determine where to send it next. The drivers use a 3-D simulation created from the photos to visualize what the rover is seeing. The virtual model of Mars lets drivers work out which commands to transmit each day. Video games have helped several rover drivers hone their skills, including Maxwell, since driving on Mars requires planning and multidimensional thinking.

Any game that shows a large open world, such as "World of Warcraft," can hone these skills, says Cooper, the first rover driver and the only person to have driven all three rovers NASA has landed on Mars.

"You're essentially driving a robot with a keyboard 100 million miles away," says Maxwell. "You can't always believe what the simulator tells you. If anything does go wrong, there's no one there to hit the panic switch."

Besides being manually controlled, the rover also has the capability to drive by itself, detecting hazards through cameras and driving around them. This autonomous mode takes more time, however, so it's employed less often.

Curiosity is landing in Gale Crater, where it may find evidence the area once was a lake. It will take at least a year to drive Curiosity to its ultimate destination, Mount Sharp, where the rover will examine layers of sediment for organic molecules, which would be signs -- but still not proof -- that life may have existed on the planet.

Maxwell will see some of the images Curiosity takes before anyone else does, but he loves that the public will get to view them soon after on NASA's website. "I get to take everybody in the world along in the backseat," he said.

Beyond rover driving, Maxwell genuinely loves the science of Mars. The rover science team has its own busy agenda, but during the mission involving Spirit and Opportunity, Maxwell would point out rocks that might be interesting to examine further, or suggest photographing the sunset on a given day. Sometimes the science team would take him up on his ideas.

"He's always looking to try to get as much out of the vehicles as possible," says Squyers, lead scientist of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, which involved Spirit and Opportunity. "Scott is, within the bounds of safety, one of the most enthusiastic rover drivers there is."

The spirit of his first car

There's a special love that Maxwell has for Spirit, the first rover he ever drove. Spirit was only supposed to last about 90 days, but the rover kept operating for more than five years.

When Spirit got stuck in May 2009, Maxwell felt like he was in an Indiana Jones movie, trying to rescue the vehicle. The rover's wheels broke through a crust and the vehicle fell into a sandy trap called Troy, like a car driving into a pool of flour. Even before the accident, one of its six wheels had quit working.

Scott Maxwell, top, Kim Lichtenberg, left, and Pauline Hwang test how to get Spirit out of a Martian "sand trap."

Maxwell and his colleagues were almost able to pull Spirit out, but not quite. They had figured out a technique, but with the Martian winter coming, the solar panels were tilted away from the sun. Plus a second wheel malfunctioned during escape tactics. Over the winter, something broke -- Maxwell says humanity may never know what.

The Opportunity rover, which Maxwell has also had a hand in driving, is still operating. Still, he is nostalgic about the Spirit.

"It's very much the way you feel about your first car," Maxwell says. "Spirit was my first car. She was just on Mars. That was the emotional closeness that I felt to her."

Even after it stopped moving, Spirit was able to continue scientific operations until March 2010, when NASA lost communication with it. The place it got stuck turned out to be extremely interesting -- while trying to escape, the rover found soil rich in minerals called sulfates, a component of steam, suggesting that there may have once been conditions on Mars able to support life.

It -- or rather "she," says Maxwell -- accomplished this with an attitude of "persistence and determination and never say die."

Scientists kept trying to communicate until May 2011, when they gave up.

"Spirit will be there for a million years, but I sure hope that there are Martian cities surrounding her," Maxwell says. He envisions trails commemorating the rovers' paths and hopes people someday will be "walking the Spirit trail."

Loving to be curious

Given the busy schedule and odd hours, it helps to be in love with someone who works on Mars, too.

Maxwell and Lichtenberg had been hearing each other as disembodied voices on NASA conference calls for years, while Lichtenberg was a graduate student at the University of Washington in St. Louis. She visited JPL with her adviser on the five-year anniversary of the Spirit and Opportunity mission.

They met in person at a group lunch; each thought the other was attractive. Maxwell spent a couple days working up the nerve to ask her out and finally did on the day beloved science fiction author Ray Bradbury gave a surprise speech at NASA. Maxwell began by asking her, "Is anybody doing anything tonight?" She said a group was going out; he replied that he wanted to go out with a cute girl he'd just met. After she realized he meant her, she said yes -- much to Maxwell's astonishment.

This week, just days before the Curiosity landing, the couple had dinner with me at a quaint Mediterranean restaurant in Pasadena's Old Town. When they weren't holding hands, Maxwell was putting his arm around the back of her chair. As they said goodnight for the evening, they kissed three times -- and both said they planned to stay up late and sleep in to practice shifting to Mars time.

Part of the fun of working on Curiosity will be living on Mars time for about the first 90 days, Maxwell says. The days on Mars are 40 minutes longer than on Earth. That means Maxwell might start at 8 a.m. Monday, 8:40 a.m. Tuesday, 9:20 a.m. Wednesday and so on. Before long, he'll be working overnights.

"I like to say I sleep 40 minutes more, I actually work 40 minutes [more]," he said.

Lichtenberg is the co-lead on the science planning team for the Curiosity mission. That means she helps other scientists decide what they will do with the rover every day, given how much power and time the tasks will take and how much data will be required.

On their first date about three and half years ago, Lichtenberg was sold when Maxwell told her that while healing from a martial arts-induced shoulder injury, he decided he would read all of Shakespeare's plays. And he did.

"He really sticks to his convictions, and I really, really like that about him," Lichtenberg says. "Being around him makes me want to be a better person."

Maxwell insists that Lichtenberg did not move to Southern California for him. She agrees that she wanted to work at JPL anyway, but Maxwell was at least "a small bit" of the decision. These days they work down the hall from each other, and although they are on the same operations team, they are assigned to different shifts.

Scott Maxwell and Kim Lichtenberg have been dating for more than three years; both work on Mars rover missions.

The affectionate, happy partners share a love of Mars and, if possible, would both like to go some day.

"If NASA set up a flight tomorrow, I'd be the first one. They wouldn't have to bring me back," Maxwell says.

He'd be gone in a snap, even if there were just one seat. Lichtenberg, although she likes the idea of visiting Mars, is not sure she'd just pack up and go by herself.

"I totally understand that you would," she tells him. "It's OK, I accept that. Totally."

"It's not that I like Mars better than I like you," he assures her. They peck each other on the lips.

But there is something powerful that draws Maxwell to Mars. It's partly the idea of being on the surface of another world. There's also his own mortality. He believes the radiation treatments he had in his 20s will ultimately lead to a different form of cancer (he actually had a possible thyroid cancer a few years ago, which turned out to be benign). Maxwell estimates -- without a hint of regret in his voice -- that he has about 20 years left to live.

"I've only got so long anyway, you might as well make it something really good. Right? You might as well make it count," he tells me and Lichtenberg. "And what am I going to do that's going to be better than actually going to Mars? Go on, name three things I'm going to do that are better than that."

"Drive a Mars rover," says Lichtenberg.

Maxwell agrees his job is "awesome" but says going to Mars would be "even better."

With that level of passion and spirit, Maxwell may one day indeed follow his Curiosity.

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Mars rovers to land 6th of august 2012

less than 3 days for the mars rover  which has been travelling in space since november 26, 2011 on its way to the planet mars. the project cost $2.5bn. what are the gains?
The vehicle, known as Curiosity, was launched from Earth in November last year and is now nearing the end of a 570-million-km journey across space.
To reach its intended touch-down zone in a deep equatorial crater, the machine must enter the atmosphere at a very precise point on the sky.
Engineers told reporters on Thursday that they were close to a bulls-eye.
A slight course correction - the fourth since launch - was instigated last Saturday, and the latest analysis indicates Curiosity will be no more than a kilometre from going straight down its planned "keyhole".
The team's confidence is such that it may pass up the opportunity to make a further correction on Friday.
"We are about to land a small compact car on the surface with a trunk-load of instruments. This is a pretty amazing feat getting ready to happen. It's exciting, it's daring - but it's fantastic," said Doug McCuistion, the head of Nasa's Mars programme.
Curiosity - also known as the Mars Science laboratory (MSL) - is the biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover yet.
It will study the rocks inside Gale Crater, one of the deepest holes on Mars, for signs that the planet may once have supported microbial life.
The $2.5bn mission is due to touch down at 05:31 GMT (06:31 BST) Monday 6 August; 22:31 PDT, Sunday 5 August.
It will be a totally automated landing.

Curiosity - Mars Science Laboratory

• Mission goal is to determine whether Mars has ever had the conditions to support life
• Project costed at $2.5bn; will see initial surface operations lasting two Earth years
• Onboard plutonium generators will deliver heat and electricity for at least 14 years
• 75kg science payload more than 10 times as massive as those of earlier US Mars rovers
• Equipped with tools to brush and drill into rocks, to scoop up, sort and sieve samples
• Variety of analytical techniques to discern chemistry in rocks, soil and atmosphere
• Will try to make first definitive identification of organic (carbon-rich) compounds
• Even carries a laser to zap rocks; beam will identify atomic elements in rocks

Engineers here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, can only watch and wait.

The vast distance between Mars and Earth means there is a 13-minute lag in communications, making real-time intervention impossible.
Nasa has had to abandon the bouncing airbag approach to making soft landings.
This technique was used to great effect on the three previous rovers - Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity.
But at nearly a tonne, Curiosity is simply too heavy to be supported by inflated cushions.
Instead, the mission team has devised a rocket-powered, hovering crane to lower the rover to the surface in the final moments of its descent.
Adam Steltzner has led this work for Nasa. He said: "It looks a little bit crazy. I promise you it is the least crazy of the methods you could use to land a rover the size of Curiosity on Mars, and we've become quite fond of it - and we're fairly confident that Sunday night will be a good night for us."
The team is also keeping a sharp eye on the Martian weather and any atmospheric conditions that might interfere with the descent manoeuvres.
It is the equivalent of August also on Mars right now, meaning Gale Crater at its position just inside the southern hemisphere is coming out of winter and moving towards spring.
It is the time of year when winds can kick up huge clouds of dust, and a big storm was spotted this week about 1,000km from the landing site. But Nasa expects this storm to dissipate long before landing day.

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83 million Facebook accounts are fakes and dupes

If you're using a fake name on your Facebook account, maintaining a personal profile for your beloved pet or have a second profile you use just for logging in to other sites, you have one of the 83.09 million fake accounts Facebook wants to disable.

In an updated regulatory filing released Wednesday, the social media company said that 8.7 percent of its 955 million monthly active users worldwide are actually duplicate or false accounts.

"On Facebook we have a really large commitment in general to finding and disabling false accounts," Facebook's chief security officer Joe Sullivan told CNN in a recent interview. "Our entire platform is based on people using their real identities."

So what are those 83 million undesired accounts doing? They're a mixture of innocent and malicious, and Facebook has divvied them up into three categories: duplicate accounts, misclassified accounts and "undesirable" accounts.

Duplicate accounts make up 4.8% (45.8 million) of Facebook's total active member tally. According to the network's terms of service, users are not allowed to have more than one Facebook personal account or make accounts on behalf of other people. Parents creating Facebook accounts for their young kids are violating two rules, since people under 13 are not allowed to have Facebook profiles.

Misclassified accounts are personal profiles that have been made for companies, groups or pets. Those types of profiles (22.9 million) are allowed on Facebook, but they need to be created as Pages. Facebook estimates that 2.4% of its active accounts are these non-human personal accounts. These accounts can be converted into approved pages without losing information. Pets such as Boo, the self-anointed "world's cutest dog," are typically classified as Public Figures.

The third group is the smallest -- just 1.5% of all active accounts -- but most troublesome. There are 14.3 million undesirable accounts that Facebook believes have been created specifically for purposes that violate the companies terms, like spamming.

"We believe the percentage of accounts that are duplicate or false is meaningfully lower in developed markets such as the United States or Australia and higher in developing markets such as Indonesia and Turkey," the company said in the filing. The tallies were based on an internal sampling of accounts done by reviewers, and Facebook says the numbers may represent the actual number.

Facebook disables any false accounts it finds, and while it wipes all the information associated with the name from public view, it doesn't delete the account from its servers "for safety and security" reasons. The disabled account goes into a sort of Facebook limbo, where the owner of the account can't get their hands on any of the content -- photos, posts, videos -- not even by requesting a copy of the data, according to Facebook.

If Facebook does shut down your account, it says you can't create a new one without permission from the company.

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Is american flag still standing on moon?

Apollo mission remnants can be seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

When astronauts first touched down on the moon in 1969 as part of NASA's Apollo 11 mission — and for every Apollo mission that followed — they left behind evidence that they'd been there, some intentional and some necessary. The most iconic of these were six American flags, all of which were thought to have been destroyed by the harsh conditions on the lunar service or at least knocked over my now. As it turns out, all but one are still standing.

Photographs taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) satellite show that five of the flags are right where we left them. The first one, by Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, was blown down by the lift-off thrust from their lunar lander as it left the moon's surface to reunite with the orbiting command module. The LRO images also show objects such as the lunar rovers used by some Apollo missions, and even the tire tracks they left behind.

One of the most intriguing aspects of these photos is the fact that the remaining U.S. flags have all turned white. This happened due to bleaching by sunlight, which hits the flags for as long as 14 days at a time without any sort of atmosphere to filter its rays. Manufactured from nylon without any thought as to retaining their looks over the decades of lunar exposure — they weren't even expected to be standing for long — the flags cost only $5.50 in the 1960s. We're guessing that the flags eventually carried to Mars by Earth's astronauts will probably be made to last longer — and cost a pretty penny more.

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