Gale Crater lies just south of the equator, near the Martian equivalent of northern Australia.
As a mobile laboratory, Curiosity will focus first on Gale Crater's 14, 700-foot-high central peak.
Curiosity landed in Mars' equatorial Gale Crater in August, and has driven eastwards almost 500m since then.
Curiosity has been sent to investigate the central mountain inside Gale Crater that is more than 5km high.
Here, a network of valleys believed to have formed by water erosion enters Gale Crater from the outside.
The vehicle is currently sitting in a small depression on the floor of Gale Crater known as Yellowknife Bay.
The Canadian north-west has some ancient rock formations, similar in age, we think, to those found in Gale Crater, Curiosity's landing site.
But mission controllers soon expect to be taking sharp, full-color images in 3-D, panoramas and high-definition videos of Gale Crater.
Curiosity's discovery at its landing site in the equatorial Gale Crater provides the first real ground truth for those observations.
The large rise in the background is the big mountain in the centre of Gale Crater known as Mount Sharp.
Prof Squyres showed a comparison of the Whitewater Lake outcrop and rocks found at the location Curiosity is exploring in Gale Crater.
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater, which hosts a mound called Mount Sharp.
The rover landed in Gale Crater and started moving towards Glenelg.
Not to be outdone by its brother, Curiosity has found the first evidence of an ancient streambed on Mars near the Gale Crater.
The Gale Crater landing site at 4.59 degrees south, 137.44 degrees east, places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's interior mountain.
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The main channel deposit seen here resembles a dirt road ascending into the mountains, which are actually the north wall and rim of Gale Crater.
In many regions of Mars, dust-devil tracks and shadows have been seen from orbit, but those visual clues have not been seen in Gale Crater.
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The Rems instrument was the sole part of the rover that suffered damage when it touched down in the equatorial Gale Crater back in August.
While Curiosity is completing the software transition, the mission's science team is continuing to analyze images that the rover has taken of its surroundings inside Gale Crater.
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Nasa expects to re-use many of the technologies that worked so successfully in getting the one-tonne spacecraft down into the huge equatorial bowl known as Gale Crater.
This color image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows part of the wall of Gale Crater, the location on Mars where the rover landed on Aug. 5, 2012 PDT.
Ken, with colleague Marco Di Lorenzo, has built a number of panoramas of Gale Crater that give us a wider perspective on the Curiosity vehicle's Martian home - literally.
Its prime target is the 18, 000-foot (5, 500-meter) peak at the center of Gale Crater, Mount Sharp, where scientists hope to get a layer-by-layer look at the history of the planet.
The overall goal of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission is to use 10 instruments on Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes.
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Studies at the Gale Crater landing site have been on hold since the beginning of March after engineers discovered a problem with Curiosity's computer memory, possibly caused by space radiation.
The rover is currently investigating a location in Mars' Gale Crater known as Yellowknife Bay, a small depression several hundred metres from the point where it landed back in August.
"This is one of the brightest and whitest things we've seen with the Mastcam at the Gale Crater site, " said Melissa Rice, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in Pasadena.
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Curiosity has already seen plenty of evidence for past running water in Gale Crater and the results from the drill-hole analysis are expected to reveal further information about that wet history.
The rim of Gale Crater may be a factor.
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