Southern Meridiani

Goal 4: Prepare for human exploration

Curiosity will be a rolling geology lab on Mars. See how engineers take a soil sample using her stunt double.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured these "sun rays" shining through clouds at sunset on Feb. 2, 2023, the 3,730th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. It was the first time that sun rays, also kn...

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drilled into this rock target, "Cumberland," during the 279th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (May 19, 2013) and collected a powdered sample of material...

NASA began a historic voyage to Mars with the Nov. 26, 2011, launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, which carries a car-sized rover named Curiosity. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station ab...

There's no wall these women can't climb. Pictured here are Jennifer Trosper (front), Micki Hurtado (center), and Nagin Cox (back).

This mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a series of sedimentary deposits in the Glenelg area of Gale Crater, from a perspective in Yello...

On Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the 197-foot-tall United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is in place at Space Launch Complex 41 after rolling out from the nearby Vertical Integration...

This mosaic shows various scenes captured from a location called "Housedon Hill" by the ChemCam instrument aboard NASA's Curiosity Mars rover between September 9 and October 23, 2020 (Sols 2878 and...

This image is from a series of test images to calibrate the 34-millimeter Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity rover. It was taken on Aug. 23, 2012 and looks south-southwest from the rover's landing site.

This mosaic, taken with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows the planned route (in yellow) of NASA's Curiosity rover from "Pah...

In the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, known as Curiosity, is being prepared to be moved to a rotation fi...

The team developing NASA's Mars Science Laboratory calls this test rover "Scarecrow" because the vehicle does not include a computer brain. Mobility engineers use this test rover to evaluate mobili...

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, a mobile robot for investigating Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life, is in development for a launch opportunity in 2009.

This image shows the heatshield inside a large 'clean room'

Half of the Atlas V payload fairing for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission is lifted into a vertical position in the airlock of the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy ...

This image (cut out from a mosaic) shows the view from the landing site of NASA's Curiosity rover toward the lower reaches of Mount Sharp, where Curiosity is likely to begin its ascent through hund...

This sequence of images shows a blast zone where the sky crane from NASA's Curiosity rover mission hit the ground after setting the rover down in August 2012, and how that dark scar's appearance ch...

Color coding in this image of Gale Crater on Mars represents differences in elevation, with blue relatively low and tan relatively high.

Engineers use the Scarecrow rover to test driving on different types of terrain. In this image, the rover was taken out to the Dumont Dunes in California's Mojave Desert, near Death Valley for tes...

This artist concept features NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to take the images combined into this mosaic of the drill area, called "John Klein."

This is a close-up view of a zone where the soil at Curiosity's landing site was blown away by the thrusters on the rover's descent stage.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity through the 2555 Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (October 14, 2019). 

This episode (part 4 of a 4 part series) shows Mars team members having a little fun on April 1, 2010 (April Fool's) at the end of an exhausting parachute test campaign. The team had just completed...