The Curiosity rover
A NASA rover on Mars
Curiosity landed in Gale crater on 6 August 2012, lowered onto the ground on cables by a rocket-powered sky crane. The size of a small car and powered by a nuclear generator, it went to find out whether Mars could once have supported life, and found that it could: the crater held a lake of fresh water, with the chemical ingredients life uses.
Since 2014 it has been climbing Mount Sharp, the 5-kilometre mountain in the middle of the crater, reading the planet's history layer by layer. Here it stands where it stopped after its latest drive, as NASA publishes it, on the real relief of the ground around it.
Key figures
- Launched
- November 26, 2011, on an Atlas V from Cape Canaveral
- Landed
- August 6, 2012, in Gale crater
- Mass
- 899 kg
- Length
- 3 m
- Height
- 2.2 m
- Power
- about 110 W, from a nuclear generator
- Top speed
- 4 cm/s
- Science instruments
- 10
- Built by
- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory