Curiosity Rover

You fancy a set of wheels that make you stand out from the crowd? A car so cool no one on Earth has anything like it? Course you do.

Well here it is and it's called Curiosity. Yours for a cool 2.5 billion dollars, sir, and we'll throw in the furry dice for free.


Built by engineers and scientists at NASA, Curiosity is a laser-toting monster that's off-road ready and will roll over rocks on the surface of Mars all day long. She has six-wheel drive, rocker-bogie suspension and mast-mounted cameras. At one inch a second, she might not be the fastest but she sure is the toughest baby you've ever seen. 


Curiosity is packed with instruments designed for one simple purpose - to look for life on Mars. It's both a robot and a mobile laboratory, with equipment to collect soil and samples of rock, sieves to sort them and onboard instruments to work out what they are. 


The robot hand can reach 6.2 feet ahead, holding different tools for drilling, scooping and brushing rock samples. 


Curiosity is the largest and smartest rover on Earth or Mars - "by far the most complex thing we've ever built", says Rob Manning, the flight system chief engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.


Adapted from How Stuff Works

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