Sandy Dunes

This color view of the parachute and back shell that helped deliver NASA's Curiosity rover to the surface of the Red Planet was taken by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) came...

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its Navigation Camera (Navcam) to capture this view partway back down a slope it climbed toward "Marias Pass" on lower Mount Sharp. The image was taken May 22, 2015...

A 3D, augmented reality model of NASA's Curiosity rover shares a scene with a real life model of the rover in a view taken with NASA's Spacecraft 3D app.

Illustrations of NASA's Curiosity and Mars 2020 rovers. While the newest rover borrows from Curiosity's design, each has its own role in the ongoing exploration of Mars and the search for ancient l...

Sheri Klug Boonstra, director of the Mars Education Program at Arizona State University, leads a group of teachers through an analytical exercise.

This May 29, 2015, view of a Martian sandstone target called "Big Arm" covers an area about 1.3 inches wide in detail that shows differing shapes and colors of sand grains in the stone. It is from ...

This is a view of the third (left) and fourth (right) trenches made by the 1.6-inch-wide (4-centimeter-wide) scoop on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in October 2012.

This oblique view of Gale crater shows the landing site and the mound of layered rocks that NASA's Mars Science Laboratory will investigate.

This northeast-facing view from the lower edge of the pale "Pahrump Hills" outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp includes wind-sculpted ripples of sand and dust in the middle ground. It was taken by C...

This is a picture of some of the women working on the Curiosity rover posing with Curiosity's mobility double, "Scarecrow," used to test drive under different soil conditions in the JPL "Mars Yard."

The total distance driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity passed the one-mile mark a few days before the first anniversary of the rover's landing on Mars.

This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this sequence of views 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 image of the northwestern portion of Mars' Gale Crater and terrain north of it, from the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, provides a locator map for some features visible in an Oc...

This panorama is a mosaic of images taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on the NASA Mars rover Curiosity while the rover was working at a site called "Rocknest" in October and November 2012.

This map shows the route that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove inside Gale Crater from its landing in August 2013 through the 524th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Jan. 26, 2004).

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars in its approach to and April 1, 2014, arrival at a waypoint called "the Kimberley," which rover team scientists chose in 2013 as the locatio...

This artist concept features NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life.

This color thumbnail image was obtained by NASA's Curiosity rover during its descent to the surface of Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT).

This oblique view of the mound in Gale crater shows several different rock types of interest to the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

This map traces where NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drove between landing at a site subsequently named "Bradbury Landing," and the position reached during the mission's 123rd Martian day, or sol, (De...

The Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity showed researchers interesting internal color in this rock called "Sutton_Inlier," which was broken by the rover driving over it.

This image maps the traverse of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity from "Bradbury Landing" to "Yellowknife Bay," with an inset documenting a change in the ground's thermal properties with arrival at a dif...

Clara Ma, winner of the contest to name NASA's Curiosity rover, in 2009 with an engineering model of the rover (left) and as a graduate student in 2019 (right)

Mars has two small, asteroid-sized moons named Phobos and Deimos.