Measurements
SAM, CheMin, ChemCam, Mastcam, MAHLI, APXS, DAN, RAD, REMS, and engineering cameras.
Mars
Curiosity is a mobile geochemistry lab studying Gale crater and Mount Sharp for habitability, climate history, and organics.
Mission facts
Expedition path
Cruise stage, guided entry, parachute, powered descent, and sky-crane landing.
Found ancient habitable environments, organics, methane variability clues, and radiation context for human missions.
Science Payload
SAM, CheMin, ChemCam, Mastcam, MAHLI, APXS, DAN, RAD, REMS, and engineering cameras.
The target reference is 1.524 AU in the compact simulator; solar-probe entries use close-solar perihelion distance while planet entries use the target world's solar orbit.
The canvas shows a clean teaching transfer and mission class. Exact flight dynamics require full ephemerides, maneuvers, launch energy, spacecraft mass properties, and operations timelines.
Expedition review
Found ancient habitable environments, organics, methane variability clues, and radiation context for human missions.
Mathematical model
Mission visuals combine catalog dates, distance vectors, speed estimates, and schematic spacecraft geometry. They are not CAD-certified vehicle meshes unless a source model is explicitly loaded.
For live-distance spacecraft pages, current position is propagated from epoch vector and velocity when high-precision ephemerides are not bundled.
Mission path arcs are schematic transfer curves anchored at meaningful endpoints, not claims of exact reconstructed trajectories.
Spacecraft parts are placed with transformation matrices. This proves the generated geometry is internally consistent even when simplified.
Verification standard: the rendered object must be reproducible from stated equations, catalog parameters, or explicit geometric transforms. Visual reference images may inform presentation only; they are not the source of orbital positions, field vectors, accretion-disk gradients, timing, or engineering layout.
Limitations: browser scenes may use bounded scale, compressed distances, simplified two-body dynamics, schematic transfer curves, or educational approximations where full numerical ephemerides, CFD, finite-element models, or general-relativistic ray tracing are outside the page scope. Those simplifications are part of the model contract, not hidden image-based construction.