Curiosity is a rover that has lived on Mars since 2012. NASA provides its 3d model for free here. Curiosity searches for signs of microbial life or water and monitors radiation, atmospheric evolution, carbon dioxide/water cycling, mineral and rock composition, organic compounds, chemical environment and biosignatures.

Print Settings

Curiosity was printed at 0.12mm (fine) layer height in SteelFill PLA, so it is deceivingly heavy for its size and a bit magnetic.

Curiosity Wiki

Each of its six 50cm wheels has cleats and is independently actuated and geared for climbing in soft sand and scrambling over rocks as large as 65cm. Each front and rear wheel can be independently steered, allowing the vehicle to turn in place as well as execute arcing turns. Each wheel has a pattern that helps it maintain traction but also leaves patterned tracks in the sandy surface of Mars. That pattern is used by on-board cameras to estimate the distance travelled. The pattern itself is Morse code for “JPL” (·— ·–· ·-··). The vehicle is ‘driven’ by; up to 200m per day. several operators led by Vandi Verma, group leader of Autonomous Systems, Mobility and Robotic Systems at JPL, who also cowrote the PLEXIL language used to operate the rover.

Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator fueled by 4.8 kg of plutonium-238 dioxide with a minimum lifetime of 14 years. Each of the two radiation-hardened computers have included memory of 256 kB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory. Curiosity communicates using an X band transmitter/receiver that can communicate directly with Earth at 32kbit/s, and a UHF radio for communicating with Mars orbiters which provide faster transmission to Earth than the lander itself. Signals between Earth and Mars take an average of 14 minutes, 6 seconds.

An estimated 20,000 to 40,000 heat-resistant bacterial spores were on Curiosity at launch, and as much as 1,000 times that number may not have been counted.

Some Cool Instruments

Curiosity is equipped with a quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS), a gas chromatograph (GC), and a tunable laser spectrometer (TLS). These instruments perform precision measurements of oxygen and carbon isotope ratios in carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) in the atmosphere of Mars in order to distinguish between their geochemical or biological origin. The DAN instrument employs a neutron source and detector for measuring the quantity and depth of hydrogen or ice and water at or near the Martian surface. The APXS instrument irradiates samples with alpha particles and maps the spectra of X-rays that are re-emitted for determining the elemental composition of samples. Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) comprises instruments to measure the Mars environment: humidity, pressure, temperatures, wind speeds, and ultraviolet radiation. laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument can target a rock or soil sample up to 7 m (23 ft) away, vaporizing a small amount of it with about 50 to 75 5-nanosecond pulses from a 1067 nm infrared laser and then observes the spectrum of the light emitted by the vaporized rock.

You can interact with NASA’s 3d model by clicking and dragging.