Mars rover beams back eerie human voice - and postcard

The first broadcast of a human voice from another planet tells us nothing new about our solar system, but talk about eerie. The Mars Curiosity rover has beamed back the disembodied voice of NASA administrator Charles Bolden, making a speech recorded before Curiosity launched.

"Curiosity will bring benefits to Earth and inspire a new generation of scientists and explorers as it prepares the way for a human mission in the not too distant future," Bolden says via the audio file.

The stunt is one of a string of firsts for the rover, which landed safely on the Red Planet on 6 August. These include beaming back stunning high-resolution colour images: the "postcard" to the right shows Mount Sharp, also known as Aeolis Mons, the focus of Curiosity's search for signs of life.

Curiosity has also stretched its robotic arm, and taken its first steps away from the landing site, which the team last week named after science fiction author Ray Bradbury.

Sniffing Florida

Bradbury Landing is the first named site on Mars not marked by an object, but by ephemeral burn scars from the rover's landing thrusters. Project scientist John Grotzinger describes the site as "four scour marks with wheel tracks that basically begin from nowhere".

Curiosity took its first sniff with the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which has two spectrometers for determining atmospheric composition.

Rather like Bolden's canned speech, however, the whiff wasn't Martian in origin. The pumps meant to clear the instrument of residual Earthly gases jammed, said SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy, "so for our first sample, we did not measure Mars atmosphere, we measured Florida air".

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