Sandy Dunes

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,...

Engineers work on Opportunity (in its cruise configuration) in a cleanroom at Kennedy Space Center. A very important part of planetary protection is keeping contaminants from humans from riding abo...

This simulation shows the first test drive of NASA's Curiosity rover. This tool, called the Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program (RSVP) helps engineers plan the rover's drives, modeling pebbl...

This left-eye member of a stereo pair of images from the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a full 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings at the site where it firs...

The 70m antenna at Goldstone, California against the background of the Mojave desert.

This view shows the patch of veined, flat-lying rock selected as the first drilling site for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity.

"Vera Rubin Ridge," a favored destination for NASA's Curiosity Mars rover even before the rover landed in 2012, rises near the rover nearly five years later in this panorama from Curiosity's Mast C...

This image show the body of the Mars Science Laboratory rover with the tubes from the rover's 'radiator' system on the outsideand inside of the body.

This animation shows NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flying over NASA's Curiosity (shown in pink) as the rover lands on the Red Planet. The video is slowed down as the orbiter approaches the lan...

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 movie clip shows Phobos, the larger of the two moons of Mars, passing overhead, as observed by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in a series of images centered straight overhead starting shortly aft...

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity cut a wheel scuff mark into a wind-formed ripple at the "Rocknest" site to give researchers a better opportunity to examine the particle-size distribution of the materia...

In this Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter view of the Curiosity rover mission's waypoint called "the Kimberley," the red dot indicates the location of a sandstone target, "Windjana," selected for close-u...

On Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the payload fairing protecting NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) stands atop the 197-foot-tall United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, which is rea...

A NASA Mars Science Laboratory test rover called the Vehicle System Test Bed, or VSTB, serves as the closest double for Curiosity in evaluations of the mission's hardware and software.

NASA's Curiosity rover and its parachute were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as Curiosity descended to the surface on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT).

This is the first laser spectrum from the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on NASA's Curiosity rover, sent back from Mars on August 19, 2012.

This graphic maps locations of the sites where NASA's Curiosity Mars rover collected its first 19 rock or soil samples for laboratory analysis inside the vehicle. It also presents images of the dri...

This animation is a shorter clip from the video "Curiosity and MAVEN Explore Mars." While Curiosity will not be able to see MAVEN as it arrives at Mars, the rover welcomes the orbiter's discoveries...

Goal 3: Characterize the geology of Mars

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...

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover can be seen at the "Pahrump Hills" area of Gale Crater in this view from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orb...

This graphic shows key features of the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS), one of the instruments within the laboratory suite named Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) aboard NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.

This image shows the target landing area for Curiosity, the rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission.

The drill bit of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover over one of the sample inlets on the rover's deck. The inlets lead to Curiosity's onboard laboratories. This image was taken on Sol 2068 by the rover's ...