NASA’s Curiosity Mars Probe Celebrating 10 years of its activity: after, after 7 unbelievable minutesDescents and maneuvers that kept everyone in suspense, in August 2012 the rover began its adventure on the Red Planet. In 120 months he traveled 29 kilometers dedicated to exploring the vast Gale Crater, which is believed to be home to a huge lake.
With Curiosity, the largest and most complex space science laboratory has reached Mars, the size of an SUV, with extremely powerful instruments and almost unlimited autonomy. In these 10 years, Curiosity has explored a large part of Gale Crater, an area considered of great importance to trying to understand the past of this planet, which is now a desert area with no visible traces of life, but was rich billions of years ago in seas, lakes and rivers.
Equipped with a drill, cams, and some damage to the wheels, but not considered alarming, the rover traveled 29 kilometers and overcame an altitude of more than 600 meters. “Perhaps the most impressive thing is that all the scientific instruments work just as they did when we landed,” said Abigail Freeman, a director at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Curiosity’s next target is the so-called layered sulfur, an area of Mount Sharp very different from those explored so far and from which could come useful pointers for the development of future human colonies.
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