(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Happy Marsiversary, Curiosity! NASA’s most famous Mars rover has now spent exactly one Martian year on our neighbouring planet.
Curiosity touched down on Mars on 5 August 2012, and we celebrated its Earth anniversary last year. But because Mars orbits farther away from the sun than Earth, a year on the Red Planet lasts 687 days, making today the rover’s Marsiversary.
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Since arriving on Mars, Curiosity has made many discoveries, including an ancient river bed, evidence for a past habitable environment and a lingering mystery over methane in the planet’s atmosphere.
The rover has spent recent months digging in a sandstone site called Windjana, where it was looking for mineral differences compared with its other drill sites. It used a camera mount on the end of its arm to take multiple pictures of itself that were combined to form a selfie (shown above), before moving on towards its ultimate destination, the 5-kilometre-high Mount Sharp.
As well as its scientific achievements, Curiosity is something of a celebrity. It has 1.6 million Twitter followers and has inspired a viral video and a Lego toy.
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