Curiosity

Curiosity, the rover of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, was the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars when it launched on November 26, 2011. It set out to answer whether Mars ever had environmental conditions that could support microbes, and early in its mission it found chemical and mineral evidence of past habitable environments. About the size of a small SUV, it carries 10 science instruments, 17 cameras, a rock-vaporizing laser and a drill on a 7-foot arm.

The rover was meant to launch in 2009. Late components and instruments pushed it to the 2011 window, raising its development cost from $969 million to $1.8 billion and its life-cycle cost from $1.6 billion to $2.5 billion, according to NASA’s Inspector General.

Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012, and has been climbing Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall mountain of layered rock, since 2014. On August 26, 2026, it marked 1 kilometer of elevation gain, and on August 30 its 5,000th Martian day.

Read more about Curiosity

• Mars: two rovers, a helicopter and samples with no ride homeCuriosity has climbed a kilometer up Mount Sharp; Perseverance has used 33 of its 43 sample tubes, one holding a potential biosignature. The $8–11 billion mission to bring them home was shut down in January 2026.