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Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped and reduced to post here, was released yesterday by the science team for the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks uphill at the mountains within which the team hopes Curiosity will soon be traveling.

A newly released panorama captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover offers the most detailed view yet of distant, wind-carved Martian cliffs, highlighting features the mission’s scientists have long been waiting to see up close. The scene was snapped at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time, showing striking blue hues in the foreground as bright morning light illuminates crags known as yardangs on the horizon.

The panorama was captured by Curiosity’s Mastcam on Aug. 11, the 4,982nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission, and comprises six individual images that were stitched together after being sent to Earth. Unlike most of Curiosity’s Mastcam images, this one was processed without white balancing, preserving the early morning appearance.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, while the yellow dot its location when the panorama was taken. The yellow lines indicate approximately the area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line the rover’s planned route, while the white dotted line indicates its actual travels so far.

At this moment the science team has still not released its planned route through those distance jagged hills. I suspect they want to get closer before committing themselves to any particular canyon.

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To celebrate Curiosity’s 5,000 day on Mars, NASA this week released two panoramas taken by the rover on the lower flanks of Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater.

While parked at a sand ridge nicknamed “Chocolatal,” NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas at two times of day. The first was taken on Aug. 30, 2026, at 9:56 a.m. local Mars time; the second was taken on Sep. 2, 2026, at 5:39 p.m. local Mars time. Those dates correspond to the 5,000th and 5,003rd Martian days, or sols, of the mission.

After being sent back to Earth, the two images were merged together. Color was added for an artistic interpretation of the scene, with blue representing the morning panorama and yellow representing the afternoon one. The resulting “postcard” is similar to past examples created with rover images, such as one taken in November 2021.

The panorama above is the morning image. The overview map to the right gives the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, the yellow lines the approximate area covered by the picture. The white dotted line indicates the rover’s actual travels since landing on the floor of Gale Crater in 2012.

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According to an update posted today by William Farrand on the Curiosity science team, the rover on August 26, 2026 achieved a new milestone, in that it has now climbed a total of one kilometer in elevation since it landed in Gale Crater more than eleven years ago.

The overview map to the right shows the rover’s entire journey, now exceeding 23 and a half miles. Though it has climbed 1,000 meters, or about 3,280 feet, it still has about 14,720 feet to go before it reaches the top of Mount Sharp, about 29 miles away to the southeast.

As the rover has been climbing it has found Mars to be a many-layered planet, with layers upon layers, each holding thinner layers within layers, down almost to a microscopic level, implying that the geological history of the red planet is made up of many cycles, repeating endlessly. And along the way the rover keeps finding strange geology, such as the cool image below.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was taken on August 9, 2026 by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on the rover Curiosity.

This camera, designed to take close-ups like this of objects on the ground, is located at the end of Curiosity’s robot arm. According to the science team, when this picture was taken, the camera was approximately eight inches away, making these flakes only inches across and one to three inches long.

Such delicate features are impossible on the surface of the Earth, because rain and wind will destroy them. We do find them inside caves, where the environment is more benign, but even there such things are rare and when found are considered special and unique.
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Looking uphill into Gediz Vallis, in 2024, when this research was being done.

This map from 2024 provides the context for the panorama above.
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Using the data the rover Curiosity gathered during its exploration of the canyon dubbed Gediz Vallis on the lower flanks of Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) inside Gale Crater on Mars, scientists have concluded that the rocky material came from above, flowing downhill in the far past in major boulder landslides and water-induced debris flows.

The panorama above was taken when Curiosity was in Gediz Vallis. The overview map to the right provides the context, with the white dotted line showing Curiosity’s actual travels, and the yellow lines indicating the approximate area covered by the panorama. From the paper’s abstract:

Curiosity investigated Gediz Vallis, a canyon within Aeolis Mons, indicating that it must have formed late in Gale’s history. At the center of Gediz Vallis is a topographic ridge, comprised of sedimentary rocks. In the region where Curiosity crossed the ridge, Arc Pass, the rover investigated the processes that formed the ridge.

Curiosity found that rocks in Arc Pass were formed by water flows rich in debris, and landslides, which originated from higher up Aeolis Mons. These transport processes were separated by episodes of wind erosion and alteration of the rocks by groundwater. These observations indicate that liquid water continued to be available for brief periods late in the history of both Gale crater and Mars. [emphasis mine]

As noted by the highlighted sentence, the geology once again says that water in some form shaped the surface. As the scientists add in the paper, however, “Any surface water was likely only intermittently available, interspersed with significant hiatuses of aeolian erosion and dry granular transport processes.” It remains to be seen exactly what state that water was in, whether liquid or ice, considering that Mars has always been too cold with too thin an atmosphere for liquid water to exist on the surface.

Curiosity spent more than a year in this part of Gediz Vallis, then traversed west into the parallel canyon, dubbed Valle Grande, that it has been climbing for the past two years.

Click for full resolution version. Click here, here, and here for original images.

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Cool image time! The panorama above was created from three pictures taken on June 12, 2026 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity (see here, here, and here). It shows the immediate ground uphill in front of the rover, which appears to be the smoothest ground that Curiosity has seen in about five years, since it entered the foothills at the base of Mount Sharp in 2021.

Since then the terrain has been routinely boulder strewn. In one case, the ground was so rocky and rough that the science team had to back off from their original plans and find a different route.

The panorama above shows something wholly different, a patch of relatively smooth ground with only a scattering of sharp rocks protruding periodically from below. This ground is likely the rover’s first taste of what the science team calls the “yardang unit”, the light colored hills in the lower right of the overview map to the right. For years that team has looked at those hills, wondering what it would be like to drive Curiosity on them. Their geology suggests a much softer terrain, sand shaped into dunes (yardangs) by the wind. The unknown was always whether the ground was structurally strong enough for the rover to traverse it.

It looks like they are about to get their first clue. Based on the panorama above, the ground appears very promising.

On the overview map, the blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, with the red-dotted line is planned route and white-dotted line its actual travels. The yellow lines indicate approximately the area covered by the panorama.