NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover achieves record climb on Mars

The rover reached the “Greenheugh Pediment” a broad sheet of rock on Mars. Also highlighted on the image released – just in front of the rover – is a hole Curiosity drilled while sampling a bedrock target called “Hutton.”

NASA writes:

Curiosity finally reached the top of the slope March 6 (the 2,696th Martian day, or sol, of the mission). It took three drives to scale the hill, the second of which tilted the rover 31 degrees – the most the rover has ever tilted on Mars and just shy of the now-inactive Opportunity rover’s 32-degree tilt record, set in 2016. Curiosity took the selfie on Feb. 26, 2020 (Sol 2687).

Since 2014, Curiosity has been rolling up Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain at the center of Gale Crater. Rover operators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California carefully map out each drive to make sure Curiosity will be safe. The rover is never in danger of tilting so much that it would flip over – Curiosity’s rocker-bogie wheel system enables it to tilt up to 45 degrees safely – but the steep drives do cause the wheels to spin in place.

You can read more on the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) website. JPL built the rover.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS