On Sept.5, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover took part in its longest single-day drive, NASA officials said in a mission update this week, according to SPACE.com.
Curiosity was close to Waypoint 1, and once it arrives there the rover will be approximately one-fifth of the way to its set destination, a 3-mile-high mountain known as Mount Sharp.
As of Sept. 9, Curiosity was 245 feet away from the Waypoint 1 checkpoint, according to NASA.
"We had a long and unobstructed view of the hill we needed to climb, which would provide an overlook of the first major Waypoint on our trek to Mount Sharp," said rover mission planner Jeff Biesiadecki, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a press statement, according to SPACE.com. "We were able to extend the drive well beyond what we could see by enabling the rover's onboard hazard avoidance system."
NASA used a spacecraft currently in orbit around Mars to help map out the 1-ton rover's 5.3-mile journey to Mount Sharp. Waypoint 1 was chosen by experts based on images collected by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, according to NASA.
Curiosity traveled 464 feet during its drive to the top of Panorama Point. The rover then took photos once reaching the top.
"We want to know how the rocks at Yellowknife Bay are related to what we'll see at Mount Sharp," Curiosity's project scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology, said in a press statement, according to SPACE.com. "That's what we intend to get from the waypoints between them. We'll use them to stitch together a timeline - which layers are older, which are younger."
The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover landed on Mars back in August 2012 to figure out if the planet could have ever been habitable for life in the past.
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