How much curiosity cost

Nov 11, , pm EST. Edit Story. Feb 19, , am EST. Data journalist covering technological, societal and media topics. Follow me on Twitter. Niall McCarthy. I accept. Take action on UpLink. Explore context. Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis. NASA's Perseverance rover has become the latest to touch down safely on the red planet.

Have you read? Here's what landing on Mars looks like thanks to footage from NASA's rover Reaching for the Moon, Mars and beyond: This is how space exploration can benefit all 6 space missions to look forward to in Perseverance is only the third most expensive Mars mission. License and Republishing. The rover then gently descended to the surface at UT Aug.

Just two seconds after the rover touched down, the sky crane and descent stage flew away and crashed about yards meters away. Curiosity landed at Gale Crater, a mile kilometer diameter impact crater estimated to be 3. The precise landing coordinates were 4.

On Aug. Curiosity began its first drive Aug. On Sept. On Oct. The small amounts of carbon detected could not be properly sourced and might have been from instrument contamination.

More conclusively, in March , NASA announced the data from the rover, based on an investigation a rock called John Klein, suggested that Gale Crater was once suitable for microbial life.

Additional analysis showed the existence of water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. In terms of rover operations, on Feb. As a result, controllers switched to the backup computer that became operational March Curiosity drilled its second rock, called Cumberland, on May 19, , creating a hole about 2. A yard drive on July 17 meant that Curiosity had now traveled a total distance of 0.

On Nov. Later, on Nov. By Dec. Through the next few months, Curiosity returned many spectacular images, including Earth in the Martian night sky. One image returned in April showed dwarf planet Ceres and the giant asteroid Vesta. Curiosity passed its two-year mark on Mars on Aug. In August , Curiosity was about to make its fourth drilling experiment but mission planners decided not to at the last minute because the rock, Bonanza King, was not stable enough.

In less than two weeks, on Sept. Perhaps the most striking announcement of the mission was made Dec. These were found in a drilled sample of the Sheepbed mudstone in Gale Crater. While these could be from organisms, it is more likely that the substance is from dust and meteorites that have landed on the planet. At the same time, new data showed that there was a recent tenfold spike and then decrease in the abundance of methane—still very tiny—in the Martian atmosphere.

Curiosity was visible in a photograph taken Dec. The image clearly showed the rover as it was examining part of the basal layer of Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater. A later image, from April 8, , also showed Curiosity very clearly on the lower slope of Mount Sharp. In late January , Curiosity used a new, low-percussion-level drilling technique to collect sample powder from a rock target called Mojave 2.

Preliminary results based on analysis by the chemistry and mineralogy X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence instrument, or CheMin instrument suggested more acidic qualities in the form of jarosite than previous drilled samples. On Feb. After a series of tests running through early March, mission planners finally directed the robotic arm to resume its work March 11 and to have it deliver a sample to the CheMin analytic instrument.

Later in March, scientists published results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science from the sample analysis by the Mars instrument suite SAM that indicated for the first time the existence of nitrogen on the surface of Mars released during the heating of Martian sediments.