Overview

Curium was first made in 1944 at Berkeley by Glenn Seaborg, Ralph James and Albert Ghiorso, by bombarding plutonium with alpha particles, though wartime secrecy delayed its announcement. It was named in honour of Marie and Pierre Curie, the pioneers of radioactivity. Curium is a hard, silvery, intensely radioactive metal that glows in the dark from its own radiation, and it has served as a compact power source and as the alpha source in the instruments that analysed Martian rocks. Warm and self-luminous from its intense decay, curium has powered instruments and provided the alpha source in the spectrometers that analysed the composition of rocks on the Moon and Mars, and it is a stepping-stone for synthesising still heavier elements.

Curium-244 sources have flown to Mars aboard NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, powering the alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer instruments that identify the chemical composition of Martian rocks and soil by bombarding them with the isotope's steady alpha radiation and reading the resulting X-ray signature, a fittingly appropriate use for an element named after the pioneers of radioactivity itself. Wartime secrecy also delayed curium's announcement, so despite being made before americium it was revealed to the public only after its sibling element.