Mars on Earth

NASA's Curiosity rover landed in the Martian crater known as Gale Crater, which is approximately the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.

Curiosity is at Point Lake on Mars and will snap pictures to send home. Find out more about the rover's 17 cameras, including why some shoot in color and others others take black-and-white images.

Clara Ma, winner of the Mars Science Laboratory naming contest.

This annotated artists' concept shows the location of all of the Curiosity rover's 17 cameras.

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...

The dual sections of the Atlas V payload fairing for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission await further processing in the airlock of the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kenne...

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 sequence of images shows a blast zone where the sky crane from NASA's Curiosity rover mission hit the ground after setting the rover down in August 2012, and how that dark scar's appearance ch...

This panorama is a mosaic of images taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on the NASA Mars rover Curiosity while the rover was working at a site called "Rocknest" in October and November 2012.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from the location where it landed in August 2012 to its location in September 2016 at "Murray Buttes," and the path planned for reachi...

This video clip shows the first Martian material collected by the scoop on the robotic arm of NASA's Mars Curiosity rover, being vibrated inside the scoop after it was lifted from the ground on Oct...

An artist's concept illustrates what the Mars rover Curiosity will look like on Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory rover is larger and can travel farther than Spirit and Opportunity, NASA's two Ma...

The location of a rock target called "Knorr" is indicated on this self-portrait of the Curiosity rover in the "Yellowknife Bay" area.

This graphic shows tenfold spiking in the abundance of methane in the Martian atmosphere surrounding NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, as detected by a series of measurements made with the Tunable Laser...

These images and overlay bar charts from the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover indicate where some high-potassium material is localized within mineral veins a...

Self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover uses thumbnail versions of MAHLI component images to give an idea of what a sharper version will look like when the full-frame images are assembled.

This 3D, or stereo anaglyph, view shows the parachute and back shell that helped guide NASA's Curiosity to the surface of Mars.

This graph shows the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Mars, as measured by the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station on NASA's Curiosity rover.

This view of a test rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California results from advance testing of arm positions and camera pointings for taking a low-angle selfie of NASA's Curiosity Mars...

The men and women behind the dramatic landing of NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars in August 2012 were honored with the 2013 Robert J. Collier Trophy from the National Aeronautics Association.

This image from the front Hazcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the rover's drill in place during a test of whether the rock beneath it, "Bonanza King," would be an acceptable target for dril...

This image shows two engineers aiming the cannon that will fire the tightly packed parachute into the wind tunnel.

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

This nearly global mosaic of observations made by the Mars Color Imager on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 18, 2012, shows a dust storm in Mars' southern hemisphere.

Grad student Nicholas Boyd (left) and Principal Investigator Ralf Gellert, both of the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, prepare for the installation of the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer s...