Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and is still driving

NASA’s Curiosity rover landed in Mars’ Gale Crater on the evening of August 5, 2012, Pacific time (August 6 on the U.S. East Coast). Fourteen years later it is still working, far beyond the prime mission of one Martian year, about two Earth years, that it was built for.

No one saw the landing live. The “seven minutes of terror” were over before anyone on Earth knew how they had gone. Signals took about 14 minutes to travel from Mars, so Curiosity was already on the ground at around 10:17 p.m. PDT when “Touchdown confirmed. We’re safe on Mars!” rang out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 10:31 p.m., relayed by the Mars Odyssey orbiter.

Every step had to run on its own. The car-sized, roughly one-ton rover came down in a sequence never tried before. After hitting the atmosphere at about 13,000 mph and slowing under a supersonic parachute, a rocket-powered sky crane lowered it on cables, then flew off to crash a safe distance away.

Within a year Curiosity met its main goal, showing that Gale Crater was once an ancient lakebed with water and the chemical ingredients microbial life could have used. In March 2025, scientists reported decane, undecane and dodecane, the largest organic molecules yet found on Mars and possibly fragments of fatty acids. A February 2026 study found that the non-biological sources it considered could not fully explain how much was there. That does not show life was there: Curiosity’s data alone cannot settle where the molecules came from, and the team says more study is needed.

Since 2014 the rover has been climbing Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometre) mountain at the crater’s centre. On August 26, 2026, it passed 1 kilometre of elevation gain from the crater floor.