In pictures: NASA's Curiosity Rover celebrates 3000 days on Mars

This panorama, made up of 122 individual images stitched together, was taken by Curiosity Mars rover on November 18, 2020. The panorama has been white-balanced so that the colors of the rock materials resemble how they would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth. (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

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NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, has completed 3,000 Martian days, or sols. Launched on November 26, 2011, it landed on Mars on August 6, 2012 and has since made interesting discoveries about the red planet.

Also read: Data from Curiosity rover hints at ancient megaflood in Mars

Curiosity is about the size of a small SUV — 10 feet long, 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall.

It has a suite of instruments:

• A gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer, a tunable laser spectrometer, an X-ray diffraction, fluorescence instrument help study the rocks
• The Mars Hand Lens Imager (for close-up pictures) and a Mast Camera (to take photos of the surroundings)
• An instrument named ChemCam to vapourise thin layers of Martian rocks.
• Radiation Assessment Detector to study the radiation environment at the surface of Mars
• Rover Environmental Monitoring Station to measure atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, plus ultraviolet radiation levels
• Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons instrument to measure subsurface hydrogen

The main mission of Curiosity was "to search areas of Mars for past or present conditions favorable for life, and conditions capable of preserving a record of life."

Also read: NASA’s Curiosity rover detects organic matter on Mars

First drilled sample: NASA's Curiosity rover successfully drilled a hole 2 inches deep in a target called (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

First drilled sample: NASA's Curiosity rover successfully drilled a hole 2 inches deep in a target called (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

First selfie: A self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the robot on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp. This mosaic combines multiple images taken with the rover's arm-mounted Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on June 15, 2018 (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

This image was taken by the left Navcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on June 18, 2019. It shows part of (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

This mosaic of images shows layers of ancient sediment on a boulder-sized rock called (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

This image shows the Martian moon Phobos as it crossed in front of the Sun, as seen by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on March 26, 2019 (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

The features in the centre of this image were formed by water billions of years ago. Curiosity Mars rover discovered them on February 24, 2020. The panorama has been white-balanced so that the colors of the rock materials resemble how they would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth. (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

These 26 holes represent each of the rock samples NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has collected as of early July 2020. (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Curiosity Mars rover spotted this dust storm around 11:35 a.m. local Mars time on August 9, 2020. It was taken from the (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)