On This Day In Space: Nov. 26, 2011: NASA’s Curiosity rover launches to Mars.
Curiosity was the biggest and most powerful rover anyone had ever sent to the Red Planet. The two-ton science laboratory is about the size of a small SUV. The mission’s goal was to search for habitable environments on Mars, or evidence that the planet could have been habitable in the past.
It launched on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. About nine months later, Curiosity made a challenging landing on Mars. It successfully used a new landing technology called a sky crane to gently lower it to the surface.
Credit: Space.com
