Curiosity (rover)
NASA's Curiosity rover lands successfully in Gale Crater
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗By the time mission control heard the touchdown confirmed, Curiosity had already been sitting on Mars for almost 14 minutes.
05:17:57 UTC, 6 August 2012
Curiosity entered the Martian atmosphere at 05:10:46 UTC and touched down inside Gale Crater at 05:17:57 UTC on 6 August 2012. The autonomous sequence from entry to wheels-down took about seven minutes, and radio delay made intervention from Earth impossible throughout.
NASA received touchdown confirmation at 10:31:45.4 p.m. PDT on 5 August, almost 14 minutes after the landing itself. The signal arrived via the Mars Odyssey orbiter and the Deep Space Network antenna at Canberra, Australia.
The rocket backpack flew away
After heat-shield and parachute deceleration, a rocket-powered descent stage lowered the 1,982-pound rover to the surface on cables. Curiosity landed directly on its wheels, severed the cables, and the descent stage flew off to crash at a safe distance.
It did not stay behind as a lander platform. Navigation data placed the rover about two kilometres northeast of the intended centre of its landing ellipse on Aeolis Palus.
Then months of checkout
Curiosity immediately returned a wide-angle view of rocky ground, then began configuration and instrument checkout rather than full science operations. Its first 90 Martian days went to configuring and testing systems.
The site was named Bradbury Landing on 22 August, so the name is retrospective when applied to touchdown day.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
What the sources leave uncertain
- The physical touchdown occurred on August 6 UTC and U.S. Eastern time, but it was still August 5 in California. NASA material therefore uses both dates depending on time zone.
- 05:17:57 UTC is the event time at Mars. Approximately 05:31:45 UTC was when the relayed confirmation reached Earth; generic accounts often confuse the two.
- The site was named Bradbury Landing on August 22, so that name is retrospective when applied to touchdown day.
Checked against
- NASA Technical Reports Server — 2011 Mars Science Laboratory Trajectory Reconstruction
- JPL — NASA Lands Car-Size Rover Beside Martian Mountain
- JPL — Timeline of Major Mission Events During Curiosity's Landing
- JPL — Where Curiosity Landed on Mars
- NASA History — Curiosity Celebrates 10 Years on Mars
- JPL — First Words of Safe Landing on Mars
- JPL — NASA Selects Student's Entry as New Mars Rover Name