NASA's nuclear-powered mobile lab — still rolling after a decade.
Curiosity is a car-sized NASA rover that landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012 and is still exploring today. Powered by a nuclear battery instead of solar panels, it proved that ancient Mars had lakes and the chemistry for life. You can own the exact patch of ground where its wheels touched down.
Own its landing site — from $99.99 →Curiosity's arrival is remembered as the "seven minutes of terror" — the time it took to go from 21,000 km/h at the top of the atmosphere to a gentle stop on the surface, with a rocket-powered sky crane lowering the rover on cables. It worked perfectly, and NASA had its most advanced machine ever placed on another planet.
Unlike the solar rovers before it, Curiosity carries a radioisotope thermoelectric generator — a nuclear battery — so dust storms and Martian winters can't starve it of power. That's why, more than a decade later, it's still driving.
Its home is Gale Crater, a 154-km basin with a 5-km mountain (Aeolis Mons, informally Mount Sharp) rising from its centre. Curiosity has spent years climbing that mountain, reading Mars' history layer by layer like pages in a book.
Curiosity found rounded pebbles and fine mudstone — proof that Gale Crater once held a lake of liquid water that could have lasted millions of years.
It detected complex organic molecules preserved in 3-billion-year-old rock, and seasonal swings of methane in the air.
Within its first year it answered its core question: ancient Mars had the water, chemistry and energy that microbial life would have needed.