Curiosity (MSL) Stories

The mission team is making sure the robotic scientist, now in its fourth extended mission, is staying strong, despite wear and tear from its 11-year journey. Four thousand Martian days after setting its wheels in Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, NASA’s…

Believed to be a remnant of powerful ancient debris flows, Gediz Vallis Ridge is a destination long sought by the rover’s science team. Three billion years ago, amid one of the last wet periods on Mars, powerful debris flows carried…

A new paper suggests the same conditions that created the cracks could have been favorable to the emergence of microscopic life.

Shortly before the rover’s 11th anniversary on the Red Planet, its team helped guide it up a steep, slippery slope to examine meteor craters.

After completing a major software update in April, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took a last look at “Marker Band Valley” before leaving it behind, capturing a “postcard” of the scene. The postcard is an artistic interpretation of the landscape, with color added…

Martian maps are full of monikers recognizing places on Earth, explorers, and even cartoon characters.

The update brings loads of improvements, the most significant being new driving capabilities.

The veteran rover captured a dazzling sunset at the start of a new cloud-imaging campaign.

Among other discoveries made by the rover, rippled rock textures suggest lakes existed in a region of ancient Mars that scientists expected to be drier. When NASA’s Curiosity rover arrived at the “sulfate-bearing unit” last fall, scientists thought they’d seen…

An instrument aboard the Mars Curiosity Rover that analyzes powdered rock samples to study the role that water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, played in forming minerals on Mars Minerals are like a time capsule; they provide…