On November 26, 2011, the NASA Curiosity rover launched to Mars.
On November 26, 2011, the NASA Curiosity roverlaunched to Mars.
Curiosity was the biggest and most powerful rover anyone had ever sent to the Red Planet. The two-ton science laboratory is about the size of a small SUV. The mission's goal was to search for habitable environments on Mars, or evidence that the planet could have been habitable in the past.
It launched on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. About nine months later, Curiosity made a challenging landing on Mars. It successfully used a new landing technology called a sky crane to gently lower it to the surface.
Curiosity takes a photo of itself on Mars. (Image credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons)
Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.
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