Mars Science Laboratory Stacked Spacecraft

This image is an artist's concept of the Mars Science Laboratory on the surface of Mars.

Animation shows NASA's Mars Curiosity rover touching a rock with an instrument on its arm, then stowing the arm and driving on. (No audio)

At the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, workers uncover half of the Atlas V payload fairing for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, encased ...

These images from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show several impact scars on Mars made by pieces of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft that the spacecraft shed just before entering ...

Researchers prepare for a test of the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument that will fly on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. The instrument uses a pulsed laser beam to vaporize a pinhea...

This animation shows how NASA's Curiosity rover communicates with Earth via two of NASA's Mars orbiters, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Odyssey, and the European Space Agency's Mars Express....

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 graph shows a spectrum recorded by the Chemistry and Camera instrument (ChemCam) in NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.

Members of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory team carefully steer the hoisted Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument during its June 15, 2010, installation into the mission's Mars rover, Curiosity.

This oblique view of the lower mound in Gale crater on Mars shows an area of top scientific interest for the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

This set of images compares the Link outcrop of rocks on Mars (left) with similar rocks seen on Earth (right).

Filled with briny lakes, the Quisquiro salt flat in South America's Altiplano represents the kind of landscape that scientists think may have existed in Gale Crater, which NASA's Curiosity rover is...

This view from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover spans 360 degrees, centered southward toward a planned science waypoint at "the Kimberley," with an outcrop of eroded sandstone in the foreground. It comb...

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

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 Curiosity Mars rover used its Navigation Camera (Navcam) to record this stereo scene of a butte called "Mount Remarkable" and surrounding outcrops at a waypoint called "the Kimberley" inside...

Curiosity’s twin, Scarecrow, gets down and dirty out in the Dumont Dunes in California’s Mojave Desert, near Death Valley.

This is the first image taken by the Navigation cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover. It shows the shadow of the rover's now-upright mast in the center, and the arm's shadow at left. The arm itself ca...

Eberswalde Crater

Goal1: Determine whether life ever arose on Mars

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...

Two 2001 images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet's appearance during a dust storm.

A History of Exobiology and Astrobiology at NASA 

Patches of Martian sandstone visible in the lower-left and upper portions of this view from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover have a knobbly texture due to nodules apparently...

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to capture this mound of rock nicknamed “East Cliffs” on May 7, 2022, the 3,466th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.