NASA’s Curiosity mission turns 10!
THIS month marks the 10th year that Nasa’s Mars Curiosity robot has been roving the Red Planet. Curiosity is one of the American space agency’s mobile robot laboratories used for exploration on Mars. The other one roaming the planet is called Perseverance.
Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012. The robot is about the size of a car and is fitted with scientific instruments to find out more about the planet’s climate, origin, structure, composition and history. It also analyses soil and rock samples and searches for those chemical elements that are important for sustaining life, such as nitrogen and oxygen.
“Curiosity plays a special role in Nasa’s Mars exploration programme,” says Mars Science Laboratory scientist Ashwin Vasavada.
“The ultimate goal is to figure out if life ever evolved on Mars, if it existed in the past or even today.”
WHAT HAS CURIOSITY TAUGHT US?
Curiosity landed on a massive crater called Gale and has since driven nearly 29 kilometres and ascended
