NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has experienced some serious wear and tear during its nearly 14 years on the Red Planet.
A new photo posted to Curiosity’s raw image server offers a close-up of the damage one of the rover’s wheels has experienced as it explores the Martian surface.
What is it?
Curiosity landed in Mars’ Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, touching down whereas hanging under a ‘sky crane’ that lowered it to the planet’s floor. Since then, the rover has traveled over 20 miles (32 kilometers) throughout the rocky Martian soil, searching for potential signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.
All of that mileage has taken a toll on the rover, as these new pictures present. Curiosity weighs over one ton, and the terrain on Mars may be fairly rocky and rugged.
NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) periodically use the rover’s cameras to test on the wheels, and regardless of the holes and cracks, the company said in a 2024 statement that they are “holding up well despite taking some of the worst abuse from Mars.”
Why is it amazing?
We’ve been exploring Mars for decades now, so it can be easy to take for granted how incredible it is that we get new images beamed from the surface of another planet to Earth daily from NASA’s two robotic explorers.
These images of Curiosity’s wheels help illustrate the incredible feats of engineering and science it took to place wheeled robots safely on the surface of another planet where they spend years and travel dozens of miles to deliver us solutions about what different worlds are like.
While they won’t be human, Curiosity and Perseverance nonetheless symbolize humanity’s first foray into turning into an interplanetary species. The groundwork laid by the rovers and different Mars orbiters, landers and probes might sometime assist humanity take its first steps on one other planet.
