Then, shortly before Christmas, the rover drove toward an area the team called Yellowknife Bay.
Pictures returned to Earth from inside Yellowknife Bay appear to show copious sedimentary deposits.
But Yellowknife seems to be the next best thing: the first truly habitable site outside of our planet.
The vehicle is currently sitting in a small depression on the floor of Gale Crater known as Yellowknife Bay.
Currently, the rover is sitting in a small depression known as Yellowknife Bay.
Once the rover has finished investigating Yellowknife Bay, it will climb back out and begin the drive to the mountain.
The current rover location, a small depression known as "Yellowknife Bay", lies about half a kilometre from the point where Curiosity touched down.
BBC: Curiosity breaks rock to reveal dazzling white interior
They lie in a small depression referred to as Yellowknife Bay, about half a kilometre from the robot's point of touchdown last year.
And go west, and even further north, back to the regions around Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut to find an already active mining boom.
Yellowknife Bay was named for an area in the Canadian Arctic where Grotzinger worked as a young man, which has rock formations nearly four billion years old.
The panorama of Yellowknife Bay at the top of this page was assembled by US-based scientist and journalist Ken Kremer and Italy-based physicist and photographer Marco Di Lorenzo.
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.
Curiosity is due to turn its drill again in this mudstone for further analysis before climbing out of Yellowknife Bay and heading for the crater's big central mountain, Aeolis Mons (Mount Sharp).
In Yellowknife Bay, the area where the rover is located, it appears "slightly salty liquid water" was once there, said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Yellowknife was chosen as a destination because it represents a different type of rock terrain from the one on which Curiosity landed in August and on which it has done most of its driving.
Then just ten years ago, 190 miles north of Yellowknife, a determined and then obscure Canadian geologist, Charles Fipke, found the rich Diavik mine, vaulting Canada from irrelevant to third-largest supplier of diamonds, after Africa (again) and Russia.
While many of us were opening presents and having our fill of mulled cider, NASA's trusty Curiosity rover was busy at work capturing panoramic views of Yellowknife Bay, a shallow area of unusual terrain on the Red planet.
ENGADGET: Curiosity spends holidays in Yellowknife Bay, immortalized on special Foursquare badge
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