Scarecrow Rover Wheel Closeup

Since landing on Mars in August 2012, NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring 3-mile-high Mt. Sharp in Gale Crater.

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...

A Russian-built, neutron-shooting instrument on the Curiosity rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will check for water-bearing minerals in the ground beneath the rover.

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...

Illustrations of NASA's Curiosity and Mars 2020 rovers. While the newest rover borrows from Curiosity's design, each has its own role in the ongoing exploration of Mars and the search for ancient l...

The Martian outcrop where pale rock meets darker overlying rock near the middle of this view is an example of a geological contact.

This image taken by the Mast Camera (MastCam) on NASA's Curiosity rover highlights the interesting geology of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside Gale Crater, where the rover landed.

This engineering drawing shows the location of the arm on NASA's Curiosity rover, in addition to the arm's turret, which holds two instruments and three tools.

This graphic shows the level of natural radiation detected by the Radiation Assessment Detector shielded inside NASA's Mars Science Laboratory on the trip from Earth to Mars from December 2011 to J...

Building Curiosity: Engineers give the rover lessons in hand-eye coordination.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity extended its robotic arm on Aug. 20, 2012, for the first time on Mars and used its Navigation Camera (Navcam) to capture this view of the extended arm.

Use geometric shapes called tangrams to build a rover and other space-themed designs!

Engineers put the rover through spin tests to ensure smooth sailing in space.

This grid shows all 36 holes drilled by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover using the drill on the end of its robotic arm. The rover analyzes powderized rock from the drilling activities. The images in the...

This mosaic from the Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity rover shows the view looking toward the "Glenelg" area, where three different terrain types come together.

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...

Astronaut Leland Melvin, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Education, has a little fun with teachers while talking about how to eat snacks in space. Melvin served on board the Space Shuttle Atlant...

Happy birthday song for Curiosity

Scientist Jennifer Eigenbrode used a soil simulant — material that closely resembles material found on the martian surface — to test the effectiveness of a sample-preparation method that was added ...

This full-resolution image shows part of the deck of NASA's Curiosity rover taken from one of the rover's Navigation cameras looking toward the back left of the rover.

How samples are delivered and then tested in the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite on the Mars Curiosity rover. (No audio)

This sequence of images shows a dust-carrying whirlwind, called a dust devil, on lower Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater, as viewed by NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover during the summer afternoon of the ro...

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity left the "Glenelg" area on July 4, 2013, on a "rapid transit route" to the entry point for the mission's next major destination, the lower layers of Mount Sharp.

Curiosity performs the first investigation of active sand dunes on another planet. Studying the Bagnold Dunes on Mars will help scientists understand the physics of Martian dunes and how they move.

This scene combines images taken by the left-eye camera of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover during the midafternoon, local Mars solar time, of the mission's 526th...