Mars Rover FAQs: What's Next The fact that the Mars rover
"Curiosity" didn’t crash during its 7-minute landing sequence
Sunday night PDT is, in itself, huge. The agency’s largest and
most complex rover so far landed safely on the red planet and
will spend the next two years investigating it for signs of
microbial life. The flawless, albeit complicated, landing was
confirmed Sunday at 10:32 p.m. PDT after Curiosity set down near
the foot of a mountain three miles tall inside Mars’ 96-mile-
wide Gale Crater. How is the Rover Equipped to Investigate Mars?
Curiosity is equipped with 10 science instruments that,
combined, have a total mass 15 times larger than science
payloads on the previous Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
Some of the high-tech apparatuses are the first of their kind on
Mars, such as a tool that can check the elemental composition of
rocks by firing a vaporizing laser at them from a distance.
Curiosity’s robotic arm will drill into, scoop, sieve, parcel
out, and analyze samples of the planet’s