Gale Crater

The Space Flight Operations Center, a National Historic Landmark, has been operational and staffed every day since 1964. Here engineers send and receive commands for any spacecraft in, and beyond,...

At the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, integration between a rocket-powered descent stage and NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, known as Cu...

This view of the head of the remote sensing mast on the Mars Science Laboratory mission's rover, Curiosity, shows seven of the 17 cameras on the rover.

This image shows the location of the 150-micrometer sieve screen on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, a device used to remove larger particles from samples before delivery to science instruments.

This image shows the cruise structure (the 'ring' on top) and one part of the aeroshell (the backshell with the rover inside) flipped over and the bottom of the aeroshell (the black heat shield) be...

In an activity called the "mini drill test," NASA's Mars rover Curiosity used its drill to generate this ring of powdered rock for inspection in advance of the rover's first full drilling.

At the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the "back shell powered descent vehicle" configuration, containing NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curio...

This mosaic image shows the first target NASA's Curiosity rover aims to zap with its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument.

This graph compares a typical daily pattern of changing atmospheric pressure (blue) with the pattern during a regional dust storm hundreds of miles away (red).

This image from the right Mast Camera (Mastcam) of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows a scoop full of sand and dust lifted by the rover's first use of the scoop on its robotic arm.

Send Your Name to Mars microchip location, taken prior to the launch of NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover. More than 1.2 million names were submitted on our web site over a one year period! Some 20,000 ...

This graphic maps the first 14 sites where NASA's Curiosity Mars rover collected rock or soil samples for analysis using the rover's onboard laboratory. It also presents images of the drilled holes...

This set of images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a fierce dust storm is kicking up on Mars, with rovers on the surface indicated as icons.

This set of three images shows views three seconds apart as the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, passed directly in front of the sun as seen by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity.

This artist's concept shows how the cruise stage de-spins outside the martian atmosphere, turns to entry position, suffers peak heating just after entry, then peak deceleration, before deploying a ...

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., celebrate the landing of NASA's Curiosity rover on the Red Planet. The rover touched down on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (morni...

Details such as the shadow of the mast on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity appear in an image taken Aug. 17, 2012, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconn...

The Curiosity rover mission to Mars is one of NASA's most complex and incredible successes. This 45-second trailer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory takes you from designing and testing the rover ...

A crane lifts the 106.5-foot-long first stage of the Atlas V rocket for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission through the open door of the Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Compl...

This low-angle self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from Aug. 5, 2015, shows the vehicle above the "Buckskin" rock target in the "Marias Pass" area of lower Mount Sharp. The MAHLI camera on...

This image shows a close-up of the rock named "Crest," taken by the remote micro-imager (RMI) on Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument above the analysis of the elements detected by...

This video clip shows the first Martian material collected by the scoop on the robotic arm of NASA's Mars Curiosity rover, being vibrated inside the scoop after it was lifted from the ground on Oct...

This composite image, with magnified insets, depicts the first laser test by the Chemistry and Camera, or ChemCam,

The development of the Mars rover Curiosity's capabilities for drilling into a rock on Mars required years of development work.

With students and NASA space shuttle astronaut Leland Melvin looking on, musical artist will.i.am posts a tweet soon after his song "Reach for the Stars" was beamed back from the Curiosity Mars rov...