Mars on Earth

NASA's Curiosity rover and its rocket-powered descent vehicle pose for a portrait at JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility.

This image is the first high-resolution color mosaic from NASA's Curiosity rover, showing the geological environment around the rover's landing site in Gale Crater on Mars.

At the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, known as Curiosity, will be integrated with a rocket-powered desce...

This color image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows an area excavated by the blast of the Mars Science Laboratory’s descent stage rocket engines

Scientist Katie Stack Morgan examines rover images on her computer. Images, even 3-D stereo views, lack a natural sense of depth that human vision employs to understand spatial relationships.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from the location where it landed in August 2012 to its location in December 2015, at examples of the Bagnold Dunes.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover's location in Gale Crater.

This detailed panorama from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a view toward two areas on lower Mount Sharp chosen for close-up inspection: "Mount Shields" and "Logan Pa...

An area inside Holden crater was considered as a landing site for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission.

The Curiosity engineering team created this view from images taken by NASA's Curiosity rover front hazard avoidance cameras underneath the rover deck on Sol 0.

Teachers gather at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., for the Curiosity Landing Educator Workshop.

The Lincoln penny in this photograph is part of a camera calibration target attached to NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, which is on track for a landing on Mars the night of Aug. 5 to Aug. 6, 2012.

NASA's Curiosity rover explores Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8-kilometer-tall) mountain within the basin of Gale Crater on Mars. 

Getting a head start on summer, Curiosity is planning a road trip to Logan's Pass on Mars. Just like Earthlings, the rover relies on a highway map and takes scenic detours along the way.

On Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the 197-foot-tall United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket arrives on the launch pad at Space Launch Complex-41, situated near the Atlantic Ocean.

Guided tour of the NASA Curiosity Mars rover's flight hardware at Kennedy Space Center.

This illustration portrays possible ways methane might be added to Mars' atmosphere (sources) and removed from the atmosphere (sinks). NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has detected fluctuations in metha...

Members of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory team carefully steer the hoisted Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument during its June 15, 2010, installation into the mission's Mars rover, Curiosity.

This mosaic of images from the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows the terrain surrounding the rover's position on the 524th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Jan. 26...

Color coding in this image of Gale Crater on Mars represents differences in elevation, with blue relatively low and tan relatively high.

In the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, spacecraft technicians secure an Atlas V rocket payload fairing around NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).

A conventional X-ray diffraction instrument (left) is the size of a large refrigerator, in contrast to the compact size of the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument on NASA's Curiosity rover...

This patch of bedrock, called "Cumberland," has been selected as the second target for drilling by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity.

The two main parts of the ChemCam laser instrument for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission are shown in this combined image.

This image shows two engineers aiming the cannon that will fire the tightly packed parachute into the wind tunnel.