Exploration of Mars over the Pacific Ocean. The NASA Mars Science Laboratory mission with its rover named "Curiosity", was launched on November 26, 2011, and landed on Mars on August 6, 2012 on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater. The rover carries instruments designed to look for past or present conditions relevant to the past or present habitability of Mars. NASA's MAVEN is an orbiter mission to study the upper atmosphere of Mars. It will also serve as a communications relay satellite for robotic landers and rovers on the surface of Mars. MAVEN was launched 18 November 2013 and reached Mars on 22 September
Crewed Mars rover rovers, because they need to know at least roughly where they are and where they are going to get to a destination. Dead reckoning was the method used by the Mars Pathfinder rover "Sojourner" for navigation. A GPS satellite network for Mars would mean a constellation of satellites in Mars orbit, but one alternative would be a surface based pseudo-satellites array. These devices would have to be emplaced with high precision, unless they were self-calibrating. An example of criteria for humaned Mars surface rover was expressed by NASA in the surface variant of the aforementioned SEV, in development in during