303-Curiosity’s First Five Years of Science on Mars

Historic Martian Milestone: NASA’s Curiosity Rover Clocks 4,000 Days on Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover has made many discoveries about Mars over its first five years, including:
Evidence of liquid water: Curiosity found evidence of liquid water in the past, including rippled rock textures that suggest lakes existed in an area that scientists thought would be drier.
Organic carbon: Curiosity found organic carbon in rocks on Mars.
Methane: Curiosity found that the amount of methane in the Martian atmosphere varies with the seasons.
Nitrogen: Curiosity’s SAM instrument detected fixed nitrogen in rock samples, indicating that biologically usable nitrogen was present on Mars 3.5 billion years ago.
Habitability: Curiosity’s scientific tools found chemical and mineral evidence that Mars could have once supported microbial life.
Atmosphere: Curiosity found that Mars once had a thicker atmosphere.

Five years of Martian discoveries after seven minutes of terror.

Five years since it landed near Mount Sharp on Mars in August 2017 and nearly three years since reaching the base of the mountain, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is climbing toward multiple layers of Mount Sharp visible in this view from the rover’s Mast Camera. Full image and caption Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS