ABSTRACT
In the past few years, NASA's Curiosity rover has advanced our understanding of the red planet to an unprecedented level (Grotzinger and Vasavada, 2012). The success of this mission, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), is the result of the work of many great scientists and engineers. In this chapter, we propose that more than 1,000 years ago, Ibn al-Haytham's fundamental ideas on optics contributed to scientific discoveries and technological advances that support the Curiosity mission. It is now more and more recognised that Ibn al-Haytham contributed significantly to the birth of the scientific method. Ibn al-Haytham's desire to better understand the world around him, as well as his determination to challenge orthodoxies in place at his time, served humanity. He was the first to suggest that light travels to the eye in rays from different points of an object and can arguably be considered one of the founders of the field of optics.
