On the first anniversary of its landing, halfway through its primary mission to Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover still has a long way to go.
To be exact, 4.4 miles. That is the distance to the foothills of Mount Sharp, an 18,000-foot mountain whose rocks could provide clues to a time on Mars when life could have thrived.
Because Curiosity is driving at a careful pace - up to 100 yards a day - the journey will take eight or nine months.
For now, science is secondary as Curiosity crawls across a barren, largely uninteresting landscape. "Pretty much pure driving, pedal to the metal," said John P. Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist.
An interactive feature at nytimes.com/science offers a chronology of where Curiosity has been and what it has done so far; new images and information will be added as the rover progresses.
According to NASA, Curiosity has already traveled more than a mile, taken more than 36,700 images and fired 75,000 laser shots to analyze rocks and soil.
The first day - or sol, the term for a Martian day, which is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth - began in the early morning of Aug. 6, 2012. (At mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., it was late Aug. 5.) The spacecraft carrying Curiosity pierced the top of the Martian atmosphere at more than 13,000 miles per hour.
In precisely choreographed maneuvers so risky that NASA called them "seven minutes of terror," Curiosity was dropped to an undamaged standstill on the surface.
The rover, roughly the size of a car, ended up right where it had been aimed - within Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide scar from an asteroid impact at least 3.5 billion years ago. In that time layers of sediment filled much of the crater, which were then somehow carved away, leaving Mount Sharp at the center...
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- Unknown Updated at: Wednesday, August 07, 2013
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