Space is not the final frontier because humankind has yet to explore it’s outer reaches. At the very least we, humankind, are able to undertake extra-terrestrial exploration albeit as space probes. Think about it for a minute, it’s been over 100 years since the Wright brothers built an flew a rickety looking plane. Nearly sixty years later man set foot on the moon. That is an exponential pace of development, look how long it took the steam powered piston to evolve into the internal combustion engine. Actually the earliest evidence of a crank and connecting rod mechanism dates to the 3rd century AD Hierapolis sawmill in Asia Minor (Turkey) as part of the Roman Empire. In the 5th century Roman engineers documented several crankshaft-connecting rod machines used for their sawmills. And now look where we are, forget about the wars, political fraudsters i.e. politicians, human kind is now looking to the next frontier, the Earth and beyond. That pace of development and that human curiosity to explore is manifested in NASA’s Curiosity Rover. Curiosity is about the size of a car, which can just about link into this post and website. It’s a slow news day people! Curiosity was launched into space from Cape Canaveral on November 26 2011. It’s destination, Mars. After nearly 1 year in space and a 350m mile journey Curiosity made a successful landing on the ‘red planet’ in an area known as Gale Crater. The goal set for Curiosity is to explore  the Martian climate and look for signs of life. Indeed Curiosity may be the only sign of life on what is a dead and barren planet. Curiosity has a mass of 899 kg (1,982 lb) including 80 kg (180 lb) of scientific instruments.  The rover is 2.9 m (9.5 ft) long by 2.7 m (8.9 ft) wide by 2.2 m (7.2 ft) in height. The rover is powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generator which has no moving parts. The actual fuel used is plutonium-328, a kind of low grade nuclear fuel spin-off, though it is still highly radioactive. Such fuel is still powering the Voyager space probe after nearly 40 years. It’s fair to say Curiosity isn’t about straight-line performance, it can only cover a couple of meters per day. But we can see what the six-wheeled explorer is seeing thanks to the probes high definition Mastcam which reveals that Mars really is as dead as the Dodo in 2k resolution. Still it’s amazing to think that we can look upon another planet from the comfort of a smartphone and in 2k definition. Now that’s progress.