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
Mars sample-return mission complexity and technical problems. One mission concept (provisionally named simply Mars Sample-Return) was originally considered by NASA's Mars Exploration Program to return samples by 2008, but was cancelled following a review of the program. A NASA-ESA concept mission was aborted in 2012. The United States' Mars Exploration Program, formed after "Mars Observer" failure in September 1992, supported a Mars sample-return. One example of a mission architecture was the "Groundbreaking Mars Sample-Return" by MacPhereson in the early 2000s. In early 2011, the National Research Council's Planetary Science Decadal Survey, which laid out mission planning priorities for the period 2013–2022 at the