Curiosity lands on Mars using a rocket-powered sky crane
A car-sized rover too heavy for airbags gets lowered to the surface on nylon tethers
Quick facts
- Agency
- NASA / JPL
- Landing date
- 6 August 2012 (UTC)
- Landing site
- Gale Crater
- Landing method
- Rocket-powered "sky crane"
What happened
NASA's Curiosity rover landed in Gale Crater on 6 August 2012 (5 August Pacific time), using a landing method never before attempted because the rover, at roughly the size of a small car, was too large and heavy for the airbag system used by earlier Mars rovers. After a heat shield and a 51-foot supersonic parachute slowed its descent, a rocket-powered descent stage took over and lowered Curiosity on nylon tethers in a maneuver NASA called the 'sky crane,' setting the rover down at about 1.7 miles per hour before explosive bolts cut the tethers and the descent stage flew off to crash safely at a distance. Gale Crater, an impact basin estimated at 3.5 to 3.8 billion years old, was chosen because scientists suspected it once held a lake. Curiosity's mission is to determine whether Mars ever had conditions that could support microbial life, and the rover remains operational years past its original planned lifetime.
Why it matters
The sky crane proved a viable way to land large, heavy payloads on Mars, a capability every subsequent large NASA rover, including Perseverance, has reused, since the growing size of scientific instruments made the older airbag method obsolete for anything beyond a small rover like Sojourner or Spirit and Opportunity.
How we know
NASA's own tenth-anniversary retrospective on Curiosity documents the landing date, the sky crane mechanism, and the rover's mission objectives; the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum overview of Mars rovers independently corroborates the sky crane's design rationale.
Sources
- NASA History Office. Curiosity Celebrates 10 Years on Mars · Primary source (author-declared)nasa.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Exploring the Red Planet with Robots · Reputable sourceairandspace.si.edu · The domain "airandspace.si.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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