Curiosity launched in 2011 and is still climbing Mount Sharp

NASA’s Curiosity rover launched on November 26, 2011, at 10:02 a.m. EST aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, inside the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, and landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012 (UTC; the evening of August 5 in California, which is why both dates appear).

At launch it was the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars, a long way from the first wheeled rover there: the size of a small SUV, 10 feet long, with a 7-foot arm, 17 cameras, a laser that vaporizes pinpoints of rock from a distance and a drill. Its question was simple to state and hard to answer: did Mars ever have conditions that could support microbes?

What it has done since launch:

• 2012: lands in Gale Crater after a cruise of more than eight months.
• Within a year: confirms the crater held an ancient lake with water and the chemical ingredients that could once have supported life, its primary goal.
• June 24, 2014: completes its first Martian year (687 Earth days), despite sharp rocks punching unexpected holes in its wheels.
• 2014 onward: climbs Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall mountain inside the crater.
• August 26, 2026: marks 1 kilometer of elevation gain, in the 14th year of the mission.

By August 2024 Curiosity had drilled 42 powdered rock samples. One, from a mudstone called “Cumberland,” yielded decane, undecane and dodecane, the largest organic molecules yet found on Mars. NASA scientists think they are fragments of fatty acids, which living things use to build cell membranes but which geological chemistry can also make, so there is no way yet to tell where they came from. That is not evidence of life, but it is the kind of question the rover was built to raise.

Curiosity’s team learned to drive around the wheel-damaging terrain, testing new driving techniques with half a rover on simulated terrain in the Mars Yard, and the rover is still working well beyond the single Martian year it completed in 2014.