Thirteen years ago last August, I was camped out in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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 the age of 13, is absolutely incredible—not only is Mars an actively hostile environment for robots, but the only kind of maintenance that JPL engineers can do is to send very, very careful software updates. Nevertheless, the clever folks at JPL have managed to keep Curiosity safe, warm, mobile, and sciencing, despite well-worn wheels and less and less power every day.…