🛰️ Mission
Curiosity
A nuclear-powered laboratory the size of a car.
- Launched
- 26 November 2011, 14 years ago
- Landed
- 6 August 2012
- Working for
- 14 years so far
- Built by
- NASA
- Where it is
- Climbing Mount Sharp, in Gale Crater, and still driving
- Best known for
- Showed that Gale Crater held a lake of drinkable water for millions of years, and found the carbon-based molecules life is built from
Did you know?
- It was lowered onto Mars on cables from a rocket-powered crane that then flew away to crash at a safe distance.
- It runs on heat from decaying plutonium rather than sunlight, which is why dust storms and winters do not stop it.
Where it went
Mars
The red planet, with the tallest volcano in the solar system.
More NASA photos of CuriosityStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.