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 while hanging under a ‘sky crane’ that lowered it to the planet’s surface. Since then, the rover has traveled over 20 miles (32 kilometers) across 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 images show. Curiosity weighs over one ton, and the terrain on Mars can be quite rocky and rugged.
NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) periodically use the rover’s cameras to check on the wheels, and despite the holes and cracks, the agency said in a 2024 statement that they’re “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 bring us answers about what other worlds are like.
While they might not be human, Curiosity and Perseverance nonetheless represent humanity’s first foray into becoming an interplanetary species. The groundwork laid by the rovers and other Mars orbiters, landers and probes could someday help humanity take its first steps on another planet.