Dunes Obstacle Course

NASA's Curiosity rover uses SAM to make the most sensitive measurements ever to search for methane gas on the red planet.

NASA readies for the experimental flight of a test vehicle designed for landing larger payloads on Mars.

The long journey to Mars through the harsh environment of space confronts the Curiosity navigation team with a long list of challenges to get the spacecraft safely to its destination.

As of June 2012, the target landing area for Curiosity, the rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, is the ellipse marked on this image. The ellipse is about 12 miles long and 4 miles wide...

This image taken by the Mast Camera (MastCam) on NASA's Curiosity rover highlights the interesting geology of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside Gale Crater, where the rover landed.

This diagram depicts rivers entering a lake. Where the water's flow decelerates, sediments drop out, and a delta forms, depositing a prism of sediment that tapers out toward the lake's interior. Pr...

Engineers use the Scarecrow rover to test driving on different types of terrain. In this image, the rover was taken out to the Dumont Dunes in California's Mojave Desert, near Death Valley for tes...

This 360-degree, full-resolution panorama from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the area all around the rover within Gale Crater on Mars.

The "keys" to NASA's Mars rovers are in the capable hands of the official rover drivers. Learn how they operate the vehicles from millions of miles away in this 60-second video from NASA's Jet Prop...

This computer-generated view based on multiple orbital observations shows Mars' Gale crater as if seen from an aircraft north of the crater.

Miguel San Martin, Chief Engineer for Guidance, Navigation and Control for the Curiosity rover, pauses to hold back tears as he leads the Entry, Descent and Landing team into the post-landing news ...

This global map of Mars was acquired on July 31, 2012, by the Mars Color Imager instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Satellite news trucks crowd the parking lots at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on Aug. 5, 2012, in preparation for the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars.

This version of a self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover at a drilling site called "Buckskin" is presented as a stereographic projection, which shows the horizon as a circle. The MAHLI camera...

Since landing on Mars in August 2012, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has fired the laser on its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument more than 100,000 times at rock and soil targets up to about 2...

Bobak Ferdowsi, Curiosity flight director, shares a special message with students on building robots.

This animated blink comparison shows five versions of observations that NASA's Curiosity rover made about one hour apart while Mercury was passing in front of the sun on June 3, 2014. Two sunspots...

This animation shows the location of a set of Hazard-Avoidance cameras on the back of NASA's Curiosity rover. Each camera is protected by a clear dust cover, shown here popping off. (No audio)

Engineers and technicians have been planning for months and working for weeks on the big move for NASA's Mars Curiosity rover.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from the location where it landed in August 2012 to the "Pahrump Hills" outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp.

This panorama combining images taken on Feb. 10, 2014, by the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover looks back to where the rover crossed a dune at "Dingo Gap" four days earlier...

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...

After three action-packed years on Mars, the Curiosity rover is ready to take on higher slopes of Mount Sharp.

Mars Science Laboratory mission team members ran mobility tests on California sand dunes in early May 2012 in preparation for operating the Curiosity rover, currently en route to Mars, after its la...

This map shows in red the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from its landing site at "Bradbury Landing" through the mission's 663rd Martian day, or sol (June 18, 2014). The white line sho...