Windows 8 app fest

http://www.thinkdigit.com/Apps/Microsofts-Windows-App-Fest-sets-a-Guinness_10847.html

Curiosity Rover

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic space probe mission to Mars launched by NASA on November 26, 2011which successfully landed Curiosity, a Mars rover, in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. The overall objectives include investigating Mars'habitability, studying its climate and geology, and collecting data for a manned mission to Mars. The rover carries a variety of scientific instruments designed by an international team.

Curiosity rover has a mass of 899 kg (1,980 lb), can travel up to 90 m (300 ft) per hour on its six-wheeled rocker-bogie system, is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), and communicates in both X band and UHF bands.

Computing:
The two identical on-board rover computers, called "Rover Compute Element" (RCE), contain radiation-hardened memory to tolerate the extreme radiation from space and to safeguard against power-off cycles. Each computer's memory includes 256 KB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory.This compares to 3 MB of EEPROM, 128 MB of DRAM, and 256 MB of flash memory used in the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Communication:
Curiosity is equipped with several means of communication, for redundancy. An X band small deep space transponder for communication directly to Earth, and a UHF Electra-Lite software-defined radio for communicating with Mars orbiters. The X-band system has one radio, with a 15 W power amplifier, and two antennas: a low-gain omnidirectional antenna that can communicate with Earth at very low data rates (15 bit/s at maximum range), regardless of rover orientation, and a high-gain antenna that can communicate at speeds up to 32 kbit/s, but must be aimed. The UHF system has two radios (approximately 9 W transmit power), sharing one omnidirectional antenna. This can communicate with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Odyssey orbiter (ODY) at speeds up to 2 Mbit/s and 256 kbit/s, respectively, but each orbiter is only able to communicate with Curiosity for about 8 minutes per day. The orbiters have larger antennas and more powerful radios, and can relay data to earth faster than the rover could do directly. Therefore, most of the data returned by Curiosity (MSL), is via the UHF relay links with MRO and ODY. The data return via the communication infrastructure as implemented at MDL, and observed during the first 10 days was approximately 31 megabytes per day.

Instruments:

Alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS):

CheMin:

Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM):

Mars Descent Imager (MARDI)

Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD)

Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN):

Launching