Yesterday, the Mars Rover Curiosity completed its first test drive. It hasn’t moved very far and at the end it was about 6 meters (about 20 feet) away from the point where it landed on Mars. During this test it moved forward, reverse and turning combining the various movements. Yesterday, NASA also announced that it officially named the Mars Rover Curiosity’s landing site Bradbury Landing after the great writer Ray Bradbury, who passed away last June and yesterday would’ve turned 92. “The Martian Chronicles” are one of the masterpieces of this writer, to honor him in this way was the least they could do.

The Mars Rover Curiosity landed on Mars two weeks ago and yesterday it tested for the first time its laser on a fist-sized rock called Coronation.

When it landed, the Mars Rover Curiosity used a program suitable to touch down safely on the Martian surface. Once that phase was over, that software became useless so the memory can be reused for a program suitable to manage Curiosity’s ground operations. That’s exactly what was transmitted from the control center during the long update it received over the last few days.

The mission of the Mars Rover Curiosity on the red planet is just beginning but already represents a triumph of human ingenuity. Many comments in the media focused on the search for Martian life forms but its mission is much broader and the knowledge that it will provide could be vital in order to establish colonies on Mars someday.

A little while ago, the Mars Rover Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), successfully landed on Mars, in Gale Crater, an ancient crater named after astronomer Walter Frederick Gale, who observed the red planet in the nineteenth century. The Mars Rover Curiosity is the biggest and most sophisticated robots sent to Mars to date. It’s three times heavier than the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity for a total of about 900 kg (about 2,000 pounds) and is equipped with instruments that are obviously more advanced.