Driving Over Sandy Ripples

Time-lapse movie of the NASA Mars Curiosity rover's last days in the clean room before being shipped to Florida for launch. (Audio: music only)

This artist's concept depicts the moment immediately after NASA's Curiosity rover touches down onto the Martian surface.

This image show the MSL BUD team

This view of a Martian rock called "Rocknest 3" combines four images taken by the right-eye camera of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument, which has a telephoto, 100-millimeter-focal-length lens.

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...

Gale Crater, where the rover Curiosity of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will land in August 2012, contains a mountain rising from the crater floor.

The distant blob seen in the view on left, taken by a Hazard-Avoidance camera on NASA's Curiosity rover, may be a cloud created during the crash of the rover's descent stage. Pictures taken about 4...

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity through the 29th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 4, 2012).

This view from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a site with a network of prominent mineral veins below a cap rock ridge on lower Mount Sharp.

Emily Eelkema Stough, Tactical Uplink Lead and Jessica Samuels, Engineering Operations Team Chief, pose for the cameras in the "Mars Yard" with Curiosity's ground test model in the background.

Excitement builds at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when news of a successful parachute deployment from the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft reaches the science team.

Preparations are under way to enclose NASA's Mars Science Laboratory in an Atlas V rocket payload fairing in this photograph from inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy S...

In the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians process the backshell for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover targeted the laser of the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument with remarkable accuracy for assessing the composition of the wall of a drilled hole and tailings tha...

Checking Contact Points for Curiosity's Drill

An etched version of Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait on the Microchip to be placed aboard NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity through the 2555 Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (October 14, 2019). 

Curiosity’s twin, Scarecrow, gets down and dirty out in the Dumont Dunes in California’s Mojave Desert, near Death Valley.

This false-color map shows the area within Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (Aug. 6, 2012 EDT) and the location where Curiosity collected its first drill...

This cut-out from a color panorama image taken by NASA's Curiosity rover shows the effects of the descent stage's rocket engines blasting the ground.

This photograph of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, was taken during mobility testing on June 3, 2011. The location is inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propul...

This chart illustrates how NASA's Curiosity rover talks to Earth. While the rover can send direct messages, it communicates more efficiently with the help of spacecraft in orbit, including NASA's O...

This sequence of images shows a dust-carrying whirlwind, called a dust devil, on lower Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater, as viewed by NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover during the summer afternoon of the ro...

Erisa Hines, a driver for the Mars Curiosity rover, based at JPL, also talks to participants in 'Destination: Mars.'

This image maps the traverse of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity from "Bradbury Landing" to "Yellowknife Bay," with an inset documenting a change in the ground's thermal properties with arrival at a dif...