Where is Curiosity right now?
Curiosity is currently about 280,396,474 kilometres from Earth, roughly 1.87 astronomical units, or 15.6 light-minutes at the speed of light. It has been in Gale crater on Mars since August 2012.
Curiosity landed on 6 August 2012 and is now past sol 4,980, which is more than 5,100 Earth days. It has covered about 37 km and climbed roughly 1.35 km up Mount Sharp, the layered mound standing in the middle of Gale crater.
Most of 2025 and the start of 2026 went on the boxwork: a grid of low ridges, one to two metres high, running for miles across the mountainside and looking from orbit like a web. Curiosity drilled four samples in it. In February 2026 the team concluded that groundwater had made it, seeping along cracks in the bedrock and leaving mineral deposits that set hard while the softer rock between them eroded away. That places the ancient water table higher up the mountain, and lasting longer, than anyone had expected.
It has since gone back to climbing. The plans for late August 2026 have it examining thin ledges of layered rock above an erosional contact, a surface where a stretch of the geological record is simply missing, and watching for dust storms as autumn comes to Gale crater.
Nothing it does is driven live. Each day's work is written on Earth, uplinked in one packet, and carried out by the rover alone.