By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | August 5, 2017
Five years after touching down on Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover mission is still making big discoveries.
On the night of Aug. 5, 2012, the car-size robot aced a dramatic and harrowing landing, settling softly onto the Red Planet's surface after being lowered on cables by a rocket-powered "sky crane." The success of this unprecedented (and seemingly improbable) maneuver sparked eruptions of emotion at mssion control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California — and at late-night viewing parties all over the world.
Curiosity landed on Mars at 10:17 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5, that's 1:17 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6 (0517 GMT), with the signal of its success reaching Earth 14 minutes later after crossing the 154 million miles between Mars and Earth.
Within weeks of its arrival inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, Curiosity hit scientific pay dirt, rolling through an ancient streambed where water once flowed. And, not long after that, mission scientists revealed a bombshell: Billions of years ago, a nearby area known as Yellowknife Bay was part of a lake that could have supported microbial life. [The 10 Biggest Moments from Curiosity's First 5 Years on Mars]
But that's not where Curiosity's story ends. The rover has continued to piece together details about the ancient Gale Crater environment — work that has led to another exciting find.
"I feel like we're arriving at a second conclusion from the mission that's just as powerful as the first, which is that habitable environments persisted on Mars for at least millions of years," Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of JPL, told Space.com.
More:
https://www.space.com/37722-mars-rover-curiosity-five-years-anniversary.html
