South Africans were given a taste of space recently when a working model of the Curiosity Mars rover, the biggest robot to land on Mars, was unveiled at Siemens South Africa’s recent Future of Manufacturing Conference. The actual rover landed on Mars in August 2012. In partnership with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Siemens used its computer-aided engineering software to test and simulate how the thousands of rover parts would work together, and how much stress they could take from temperature, friction and pressure changes during the mission, using what is called kinetic simulation.