Over the next few years, we should be learning quite a bit more about our Martian neighbors. The Curiosity Rover is just starting out, but if it performs as well as its predecessors, then it should provide tons of interesting data about Mars and its geological history. When Curiosity ceases to function, maybe we'll be more willing to send manned missions, but robots seem to be doing a pretty good job so far. Here are just a few interesting tidbits on the red planet.

• Analysis of two Martian meteorites suggests that Mars may have contained much more water than previous estimates. During the formation of Mars, water was likely to be present in the Martian mantle in similar proportions as the Earth's mantle. [url]
• The Mars Curiosity Rover isn't the only spacecraft to try to land on an astronomical object in our solar system. At least twelve other unmanned crafts have hit moons, asteroids or other planets: the Soviet Union's Luna 9, NASA'a Surveyor 1 on the moon, the Lunokhod 1 on the moon, Russia's Venera 7 on Venus, Soviet Mars 3, the Viking 1 and Viking 2 spacecrafts on Mars, the Mars Pathfinder, the NEAR Shoemaker on an asteroid, Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the Huygens probe of Titan, Japan's Hayabusa probe, and the Mars Phoenix lander. [url]
• The 11-year-old Mars Odyssey probe is serving as a "real time" communications relay for Curiosity, allowing Curiosity to focus more of its energy on exploring Mars. Two other Mars satellites (NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the European Space Agency's Mars Express) are also re-transmitting signals from Curiosity, but with delays of several hours. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

The successful landing of NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars will hopefully be followed by several years of fascinating data collection about our planetary neighbor. The mission has already gathered tons of useful radiation measurements on its journey that will give scientists a better idea of what kind of radiation levels a future manned mission would face on a similar trip to Mars. Here are just a few other interesting Mars-related missions to peruse while Curiosity performs its self-diagnostics before roaming around the surface of Mars.

• Last year, Opportunity found some "slam dunk" evidence of water having existed on Mars. There may have been an ancient "wet" Martian surface that was hospitable to our own biology, and Curiosity may find additional geological evidence to support a watery history on Mars. [url]
• NASA also recently tested an inflatable heat shield, capable of withstanding hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 10. The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment 3 (IRVE-3) could help designers create spacecraft that can land on Mars without the use of fancy rocket cranes. [url]
• India is planning its own mission to mars in 2013 at an estimated cost of $70-90 million. But India's Department of Science hasn't fully approved a Mars mission with full funding, so these plans could be delayed. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

We hear from copyright system supporters that bogus copyright takedowns are rare and we only highlight the "exceptions." Of course, it seems like there are an awful lot of these exceptions. The latest is that with the massive success of last night's Mars landing of the Curiosity Rover, NASA posted the video to YouTube for those who didn't watching the thrilling, suspenseful landing live... except, if you checked out NASA's own YouTube page a few hours later, you got this:
screenshot courtesy of Motherboard It's back now, but as Vice's Motherboard blog explains, this kind of thing happens all the time. They spoke with Bob Jacobs, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Communications, who said that this happens about once a month, and almost always happens with NASA's popular videos.

“We spend too much time going through the administrative process to clear videos slapped with needless copyright claims,” says NASA’s Bob Jacobs. “YouTube seems to be missing a ‘common sense’ button to its processes, especially when it involves public domain material paid for by the American taxpayer.”

Jacobs is quite reasonably annoyed at the lack of consequences for these bogus takedowns:

“There seems to be few consequences for companies that engage in such activities, which often include legitimate news organizations. We do agree that people who make false copyright claims against our material should be held accountable, regardless of their automated systems.”

What's amazing here is that Scripps is a repeat offender with NASA. Back in April, people noticed that it had forced the removal of NASA's (again, public domain) footage of the Boeing 747 that carried the space shuttle Discovery to the Smithsonian (its "final journey"). But, of course, there aren't many (or even any) serious consequences for these kinds of mistakes. While it's not clear what happened, it seems likely that Scripps replayed the footage itself somewhere, and via some semi-automated process uploaded it to YouTube's ContentID, in which it claimed copyright on all its works. But, of course, it was actually broadcasting public domain video from NASA. Unfortunately, YouTube can't recognize that Scripps is the latecomer here, rebroadcasting others' public domain material, and thus took down the material, only to have it corrected later.

Given that Scripps is now a repeat offender, it seems that perhaps YouTube should cut it off from automatically censoring others' videos.

Oh, and if you want to know one of the reasons we're so concerned about a possible broadcast treaty (which the US government is now supporting), it's because it actually would make these kinds of claims quasi-legal, in that broadcasters who broadcast public domain material could then claim a separate "broadcast right" over that footage. Even without that, we see operations like Scripps abusing the law. Do we really want to expand that power?

Now, since the video is back up, here's the actual (public domain) footage, in case you missed it (and if you did miss it, you should watch it, as it really is incredible):

Robots are incredibly useful machines that are becoming more and more important for everyone. Kids are building them. Robots are building more robots. Pretty soon, we'll be surrounded by robots... oh sorry Roomba, we already are. Here are some cool videos and some examples of robots that are helping us out (and not trying to enslave us).

• Watch a solid block of aluminum get carved into a racing helmet by a fancy robotic drill. Injection molding is so 20th century. [url]
• Protei is an autonomous sailing robot that will try to remove surface oil pollution from the ocean -- aiming to help out cleaning up the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. This Kickstarter project has been funded with over $30,000 to build a full scale prototype. [url]
• The Landroids is a team of kids who like to build Lego robots -- and offer encouragement to other kids who might enter the Google Science Fair. And they put in 20-30 hours per week on their robot-building projects! [url]
• The next robot to go to Mars is called Curiosity, and it's pretty big -- about twice as long as the previous Mars rovers. Hopefully, Curiosity won't kill cats aliens on Mars... [url]
• To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.