HAPPY BIRTHDAY CURIOSITY
by Hazed
Everybody sing: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Curiosity… happy birthday to you!
Earlier this week, on Tuesday 24 June, the Martian rover Curiosity celebrated its first year of trundling across the planet’s surface. That’s a Martian year – 687 of our Earthling days. Here’s a birthday selfie that Curiosity sent back.
It’s safe to say that its mission has been a success. It set out with the goal of finding out whether Mars could have supported basic life as we know it, and by last March its drilled rock samples had showed that the planet once had warm, flowing water and all the other ingredients necessary to sustain life. Since then, further rock samples from two other sites have added more evidence to back up the conclusion.
Now it’s heading for Mount Sharp where it will examine rock strata.
While the mission was originally planned to last for one Martian year, meaning that Curiosity has fulfilled its expected lifespan, it’s actually good to carry on for a while yet because the engineers at NASA have a habit of designing parts to last two or three times longer than needed. So we may see Curiosity make it to its second Martian birthday.