Mars Rover Gets the Drill

The development of the Mars rover Curiosity's capabilities for drilling into a rock on Mars required years of development work.

This image shows the body of the Mars Science Laboratory rover inside a clean room, supported by its six huge wheels and suspension system. Specially fitted platforms underneath the wheels hold the...

This image graphs four gases released ("evolved") when powdered rock from the target rock "Cumberland" was heated inside the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite on NASA's Curiosity Mars ...

A NASA Mars Science Laboratory test rover called the Vehicle System Test Bed, or VSTB, serves as the closest double for Curiosity in evaluations of the mission's hardware and software.

This graphic shows the variation of radiation dose measured by the Radiation Assessment Detector on NASA's Curiosity rover over about 50 sols, or Martian days, on Mars.

Clouds drift across the sky above a Martian horizon in this accelerated sequence of enhanced images taken on July 17, 2017, by the Navcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.

Clara Ma signs Curiosity

After a rocket-powered descent stage, also known as the sky crane, delivered NASA's Curiosity rover to Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT), 2012, it flew away and fell to the surface.

These three versions of the same image taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity illustrate different choices that scientists can make in presenting the colors recorded by t...

Mastcam 100: Longer Focal-Length Eye of Mast Camera Pair for Mars Rover

This image shows the location of the 150-micrometer sieve screen on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, a device used to remove larger particles from samples before delivery to science instruments.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity held its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera about 10.5 inches (27 centimeters) away from the top of a rock called "Bathurst Inlet" for a set of eight images combined i...

This image shows the first holes into rock drilled by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, with drill tailings around the holes plus piles of powdered rock collected from the deeper hole and later discarde...

Clara Ma, winner of the contest to name NASA's Curiosity rover, in 2009 with an engineering model of the rover (left) and as a graduate student in 2019 (right)

Access Mars lets users visit several sites from the past five years of discoveries made by NASA's Curiosity rover.

On this image of the rock target "Knorr," color coding maps the amount of mineral hydration indicated by a ratio of near-infrared reflectance intensities measured by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NA...

This is the first image taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT).

This drawing of the Mars Science Laboratory mission's rover, Curiosity, indicates the location of science instruments and some other tools on the car-size rover.

Curiosity will spend the holidays at a location on Mars dubbed "Grandma's House."

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, which landed the rover Curiosity on Mars in August 2012, accepts the Robert J. Collier Trophy from the National Aeronautic Association at a ceremony in Arlin...

This self-portrait of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity combines dozens of exposures taken by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (...

Soar over the crater on Mars that will be the landing site for NASA's Curiosity rover.

Three images from the tool called AI4Mars show different kinds of Martian terrain as seen by NASA's Curiosity rover. By drawing borders around terrain features and assigning one of four labels to t...

This 360-degree panorama was acquired on Sept. 4, 2016, by the Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover while the rover was in a scenic area called "Murray Buttes" on lower Mount Sharp. The flat-...

This image is from a test series used to characterize the 100-millimeter Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity rover. It was taken on Aug. 23, 2012, and looks south-southwest from the rover's landing site.