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- The Mars rover ‘Curiosity’ has completed 3,000 Martian days.
NASA Curiosity Mission
- The Curiosity is the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars. It landed on Mars in August, 2012.
- The purpose of the mission is to find chemical and mineral evidence of past habitable environments on Mars.
Curiosity Rover
- Curiosity is an SUV-sized Mars rover designed to explore the Gale crater on Mars as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission
- The main mission of Curiosity was “to search areas of Mars for past or present conditions favourable for life, and conditions capable of preserving a record of life.”
It has a suite of instruments:
- A gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer, a tunable laser spectrometer, X-ray diffraction, fluorescence instrument help study the rocks
- The Mars Hand Lens Imager (for close-up pictures) and a Mast Camera (to take photos of the surroundings)
- An instrument named ChemCam to vaporize thin layers of Martian rocks.
- Radiation Assessment Detector to study the radiation environment at the surface of Mars
- Rover Environmental Monitoring Station to measure atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, plus ultraviolet radiation levels
- Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons instrument to measure subsurface hydrogen.
Source: mars.nasa.gov and The Hindu
