Mars

Curiosity expedition profile.

Curiosity is a mobile geochemistry lab studying Gale crater and Mount Sharp for habitability, climate history, and organics.

Loading mission geometry...

Mission facts

Launch, target, and status

Target
Mars
Agency
NASA / JPL
Launch
November 26, 2011
Arrival / encounter
August 6, 2012
Mission type
Rover
Current status
Operating Mars rover
Launch vehicle
Atlas V
Reference target orbit
1.524 AU from Sun

Expedition path

How the spacecraft travelled

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

What this mission measured

Measurements

SAM, CheMin, ChemCam, Mastcam, MAHLI, APXS, DAN, RAD, REMS, and engineering cameras.

Target environment

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.

Review note

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

Why Curiosity matters

Found ancient habitable environments, organics, methane variability clues, and radiation context for human missions.

Mathematical model

Mission trajectory and spacecraft 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.

Vector propagation

\[\mathbf{r}(t)=\mathbf{r}_0+\mathbf{v}(t-t_0)\]

For live-distance spacecraft pages, current position is propagated from epoch vector and velocity when high-precision ephemerides are not bundled.

Transfer curve

\[\mathbf{r}_{\mathrm{curve}}(u)=\operatorname{Bezier}\!\left(\mathbf{r}_{\mathrm{launch}},\mathbf{r}_{\mathrm{mid}},\mathbf{r}_{\mathrm{target}}\right)\]

Mission path arcs are schematic transfer curves anchored at meaningful endpoints, not claims of exact reconstructed trajectories.

Dimensional hierarchy

\[T_{\mathrm{world}}=T_{\mathrm{parent}}RS\]

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.

Open the full site-wide mathematical verification policy