Curiosity’s 13 Years of Software Hacks Keeps It Alive on Mars (opens in new tab)

camped out in the Jet Propulsion Lab press room in Pasadena, Calif., waiting to see whether the Curiosity rover would survive its descent and skycrane-assisted landing on the surface of Mars. It did, and it was awesome.Since then, Curiosity (also known as Mars Science Laboratory) has traveled nearly 37 kilometers, drilled into and sampled 42 different rocks, and as of publication, has snapped nearly 763,000 photos. The fact that this robot is still hard at work, getting real science done at t...