NASA celebrates Curiosity's first year on Mars

NASA's Curiosity rover marked the one-year anniversary of its arrival on Mars on Tuesday. During a press conference chaired by Dan McCleese, Chief Scientist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the organisation looked back at the past year. The mobile laboratory has already achieved its main goal of proving that ancient Mars had the capacity to support life.

According to McCleese "the rover's performance has just been, I think, an excess of what the most optimistic of us had imagined it might be". He said he considers it "an astonishingly powerful tool for science."

The Curiosity rover is the size of a car and over the past year has provided more than 190 GB of data, including more than 36,000 full images. It has also fired more than 75,000 laser shots to investigate the composition of targets and has collected and sampled material from two rocks.