Curiosity was NASA’s rover that landed on Mars in August 2012 and carried the first spaceborne laser used on another planet.
The rover arrived in Gale Crater on 6 August 2012 using a novel sky-crane landing system. Its main mission was to determine whether Mars ever had environments capable of supporting microbial life. Curiosity’s size and scientific equipment made it substantially more capable than earlier Mars rovers.
Its ChemCam instrument fires a laser at rocks and analyzes the resulting vapor from a distance. This lets scientists identify the chemical composition of targets without driving directly to every sample. Curiosity also drilled into Martian rocks and discovered evidence of ancient freshwater environments.
Curiosity is sometimes confused with Perseverance, which landed in 2021 and carries instruments designed to search for signs of ancient microbial life and cache rock samples. Spirit and Opportunity were smaller rovers from an earlier NASA mission.