NASA robots craft that will be designed to fly in a formation. The Mars rover Curiosity is a mobile laboratory that was launched from Cape Canaveral in 2011. The Curiosity landed on Mars surface August 6, 2012. This was the largest rover NASA has put on Mars, being twice as long and five times as heavy as its processors. Despite the extra size the Curiosity took many design elements from the previous generation of Mars rovers such as six wheel drive, rocker-bogie suspension, and cameras mounted to the mast of the rover to help the mission's team direct the rover. However unlike
Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander is identical to that of the Mars Polar Lander, which had been intended to be the first of a series of low-cost "Mars Surveyor" landers sent to Mars. Prior to mission cancellation, cost overruns and technical problems caused the Lander design to be rescoped, and the planned large Athena rover was replaced by a small rover duplicating the "Sojourner" which was a part of the Mars Pathfinder mission. (The Athena did later make it to Mars, however, with two such rovers making up the Mars Exploration Rover Mission of 2004. The second of these, MER-B "Opportunity", landed at Mars Surveyor