Thirteen years ago last August, I was camped out in the Jet Propulsion Lab press room in Pasadena, Calif., waiting to see whether the Curiosity rover would survive its descent and skycrane-assisted landing on the surface of Mars. It did, and it was awesome . Since then, Curiosity (also known as Mars Science Laboratory) has traveled nearly 37 kilometers , drilled into and sampled 42 different rocks , and as of publication, has snapped nearly 763,000 photos . The fact that this robot is still hard at work , getting real science done at the age of 13, is absolutely incredible—not only is Mars an
Source: IEEE Spectrum — Robotics — read the full report at the original publisher.