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At DESIGN West in San Jose on April 23, 2013, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory avionics systems engineer Luke Dubord gave several hundred engineers a virtual tour of the Curiosity rover. The EDN presentation followed the spacecraft from its electronics and power systems through its Skycrane landing and toward its planned geological work at Mount Sharp.
What was the DESIGN West Mars rover tour?
It was a keynote presentation about the engineering behind NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, reported by EDN as a slideshow in 2013. Rather than a current DESIGN West event, it is a historical look at how engineers assembled a large robotic laboratory for Mars exploration.
Dubord invited the engineering audience to take part in the broader exploration effort: “We’d really appreciate it if as a community of engineers you join us on that journey of exploration.” EDN’s report places the talk in San Jose on April 23, 2013, before several hundred engineers.
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Luke Dubord, an avionics systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), presented the keynote. The technical focus was the rover as an integrated spacecraft: its mass and instruments, computing hardware, power supply, and the landing system that delivered it to the Martian surface.
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What was aboard Curiosity?
EDN described Curiosity as weighing about 900 kilograms; one of its image captions gives the more precise-looking figure of 899 kg. These are best read as rounded and captioned versions of an approximate mass, not competing specifications. The caption says the rover carried about 70 kg of instruments.
The electronics included nearly three dozen custom field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), alongside SPARC and PowerPC processors. FPGAs are configurable logic devices; their presence alongside general-purpose processors illustrates the mix of specialized and programmable computing in the rover’s avionics. EDN’s slideshow does not provide a full component inventory or assign particular tasks to each processor.
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Power and storage
EDN’s account identifies solar arrays and two rechargeable batteries as the rover’s power system. The batteries provided energy storage alongside the arrays; the slideshow does not give capacity, output, or operating-life figures.
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How did Curiosity land on Mars?
The mission used a Skycrane to lower the rover to the Martian surface. In this landing approach, the descent system suspended the rover during the final delivery rather than setting it down as a single lander-and-rover unit. The slideshow presents this as a key part of the engineering story, but does not supply detailed landing sequence timings or performance data.
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What did the tour say about Mount Sharp?
The 2013 mission narrative looked ahead to Curiosity’s journey toward Mount Sharp for geological study. That is the destination and objective described in the historical report; the slideshow alone does not establish later discoveries or mission findings at the mountain.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How did Curiosity compare with earlier Mars rovers?
EDN’s accompanying photo report places Curiosity alongside Opportunity and Sojourner to show the change in scale across rover generations. The years below are the dates associated with those rover generations in the report, not a comparison of their complete operational histories.
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| Rover | Year shown in EDN’s report | Comparison supported by the report |
|---|---|---|
| Curiosity | 2012 | About 899–900 kg, about 70 kg of instruments, nearly three dozen custom FPGAs, SPARC and PowerPC processors, solar arrays and two rechargeable batteries; delivered by Skycrane. The 2013 narrative followed its route toward Mount Sharp. |
| Opportunity | 2003 | Shown beside Curiosity as an earlier, smaller rover; EDN’s photo report does not state comparable mass, payload, computing, power, landing, or mission figures. |
| Sojourner | 1996 | Shown beside Curiosity as an earlier, smaller rover; EDN’s photo report does not state comparable mass, payload, computing, power, landing, or mission figures. |
The report also shows Dubord with rover models in NASA’s “Mars yard,” an outdoor experimental space. Together, the models and comparison image help put Curiosity’s size and complexity in context without implying that the earlier rovers used the same architecture.
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