A Successful Curiosity
NASA's newest Mars rover is its most ambitious yet.
The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity launched toward the Red Planet in late November 2011, landed inside Mars' Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, and soon began hunting for clues about the area's past potential to support microbial life.
The landing was far from easy, however. The 1-ton rover was lowered to the surface on cables by a rocket-powered sky crane, a maneuver that had never been attempted before on another planet. Everything worked perfectly, and NASA will use the same basic technique on its Mars 2020 rover, which is slated to touch down in 2021.
So Long, Schiaparelli
The European Space Agency's Schiaparelli lander, part of the ExoMars mission to Mars, was slated to land on the Red Planet on Wednesday, Oct. 19.
Schiaparelli unexpectedly went silent less than a minute before landing on Mars, but it did manage to successfully transmit plenty of data before losing contact. ESA found that the lander's thrusters did not fire as long as expected, causing Schiaparelli to fall to the Martian surface from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometers. The probe likely crashed into Mars at a speed in excess of 300 km/h.