With ChemCam onboard, the Curiosity rover successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center at 10:02 a.m. US EST on November 26, 2012. It is expected to land at Gale Crater on Mars the night of August 5, 2012, or early in the morning on August 6, depending on your time zone. To currently see where in the solar system ChemCam and the rover are, visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Where is Curiosity? page.

ChemCam's journey to Mars onboard the Mars Science Laboratory rover will be a long one. But ChemCam had to complete a long journey on Earth before arriving at the launch pad. The mast unit was assembled in Toulouse, France (Figure 1) before being shipped to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA. The body unit was assembled at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Figure 2). The mast unit and body unit were combined at Los Alamos before being shipped to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, USA (Figure 3). Here, the ChemCam instrument was added to the Curiosity rover in the spring of 2011. In June 2011, the rover, with ChemCam attached, arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (Figure 4) to prepare for its November launch.