On June 24, 2014 NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, completed its first Mars year, which is 687 days on Earth.

Curiosity has accomplished the mission's main goal of determining whether Mars once offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012. One of its first major findings was an ancient riverbed near its landing site. One of Curiosity's first major findings after landing on the Red Planet in August 2012 was an ancient riverbed.

At an area known as Yellowknife Bay, the mission met its primary objective of determining whether Mars was habitable for simple life forms in the distant past. NASA's Curiosity found two mudstone slabs that the rover sampled with its drill. Analysis of these samples revealed the site once had with water, the essential elemental ingredients for life, and a type of chemical energy source used by some microbes on Earth.

Curiosity has also achieved several other important discoveries which include, assessing natural radiation levels both during the flight to Mars and on the Martian surface in advance of a manned mission, measuring Mars' atmosphere to determine amount of biological methane and how Mars lost its atmosphere, and conducted the first experiments as to the age of rocks on Mars by determining how long they had been exposed to radiation.

Curiosity also stopped to collect a sample from a sandstone site called Windjana. The rover currently is carrying some of the rock-powder sample collected at the site for follow-up analysis.

"Windjana has more magnetite than previous samples we've analyzed," said David Blake, principal investigator for Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. "A key question is whether this magnetite is a component of the original basalt or resulted from later processes, such as would happen in water-soaked basaltic sediments. The answer is important to our understanding of habitability and the nature of the early-Mars environment."

This finding implies that some rocks on the Gale Crater rim, from which the Windjana sandstones are thought to have been derived, may have experienced complex geological processing, such as multiple episodes of melting.

"It's too early for conclusions, but we expect the results to help us connect what we learned at Yellowknife Bay to what we'll learn at Mount Sharp," said John Grotzinger, Curiosity project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "Windjana is still within an area where a river flowed. We see signs of a complex history of interaction between water and rock."

Curiosity departed Windjana in mid-May and is advancing westward. It has covered about nine-tenths of a mile (1.5 kilometers) in 23 driving days and brought the mission's odometer tally up to 4.9 miles (7.9 kilometers).