Lego Curiosity Rover in Action!

Recently, Lego announced the Lego Curiosity rover kit will be in stores on Jan. 1st. 2014. For those who follow the Cuusoo fan project submission process, the Curiosity rover kit was a winning design submitted by a NASA/JPL engineer.

Keep reading to learn more about the Lego Curiosity rover I built, and what might be different with the official kit.

My build was sourced from parts via rebirckable.com and Brick Owl. The plans I followed at available at: http://rebrickable.com/mocs/StephenPakbaz/mars-science-laboratory-curiosity-rover. After shipping from various part brokers around the world, I think I spent about $50 sourcing the parts to build the rover, which isn’t terribly bad, considering the official kit will sell for $39.99.

One thing I love about this build is that you can actually play with it! Some homebrew Lego kit builds are incredibly fragile. While I wouldn’t want to drop my rover from a meter up in the air, it will withstand my toddler using it as a toy car!

I was incredibly surprised by how accurate this build is for a Lego kit. The recent fan-submitted kit offering of the Delorean time machine from “Back To the Future” is rather lacking in aesthetics. Additionally, I love how the rocker bogey suspension is accurately modeled in this kit, and actually allows the rover to climb over some pretty impressive objects, such as my fossil and meteorite collection.

Lego states that as part of their Cuusoo review process, they take build quality, playstyle, and other factors into consideration, and often do make modifications to the original project submission.

In the image above, I can spot a few minor differences, such as brick colors, and a few style changes. I’ll definitely be purchasing this kit (possibly two so I can keep one mint in box), so I can have my build, and the official build on my shelf.