Thirteen years ago last August, I was camped out in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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 actively hostile environment for robots, but the only kind of maintenance that JPL engineers can do is to send very, very careful software updates. Nevertheless, the clever folks at JPL have managed to keep Curiosity safe, warm, mobile, and sciencing, despite well-worn wheels and less and less power every day.
One of those folks is Alexandra Holloway , the assistant team chief for engineering operations for Curiosity, who spoke to IEEE Spectrum about keeping Curiosity roving, what its future looks like, and how JPL has used that experience to make rovers like Perseverance even more capable. How astonished should we be that after 13 years on Mars, Curiosity is not only still doing science, but actually getting more capable? Alexandra Holloway is the assistant team chief for engineering operations on the Curiosity Mars rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Alexandra Holloway Alexandra Holloway: I’m astonished! The longevity comes from a lot of ongoing work. It’s not just that Curiosity was built robustly; it’s also because we’re continuously putting in effort to ensure it can continue to have that lifespan. I think about all the different kinds of embedded systems there ar
