Sandy Dunes

This 360-degree vista was acquired on Aug. 5, 2016, by the Mastcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover as the rover neared features called "Murray Buttes" on lower Mount Sharp. The dark, flat-topped mes...

Stitched together from 28 images, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured this view from "Greenheugh Pediment" on April 9, 2020, the 2,729th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. In the foreground is t...

Grad student Nicholas Boyd (left) and Principal Investigator Ralf Gellert, both of the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, prepare for the installation of the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer s...

This view of grains from a sand dune near Christmas Lake, Ore., was taken by a testing twin of the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory.

The mesa in the center of this scene from the "Murray Buttes" area on Mars is longer than a football field. The panorama combines images taken by the Mastcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on Aug. ...

This image show the body of the Mars Science Laboratory rover with the tubes from the rover's 'radiator' system on the outsideand inside of the body.

Filled with briny lakes, the Quisquiro salt flat in South America's Altiplano represents the kind of landscape that scientists think may have existed in Gale Crater, which NASA's Curiosity rover is...

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to take the images combined into this mosaic of the drill area, called "John Klein."

This graphic shows key features of the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS), one of the instruments within the laboratory suite named Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) aboard NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.

View the video 'Mars Rover Gets the Drill'

This artist's animation shows how NASA's Curiosity rover will communicate with Earth via two of NASA's Mars orbiters, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey. As the rover descends to the surface o...

Scientists used the ChemCam instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover to examine a Martian rock "shell" about one inch across, embedded in bedrock and with a hollow interior. This graphic combines...

This stereo scene looking back at where Curiosity crossed a dune at "Dingo Gap" combines several exposures taken by the Navigation Camera (Navcam) high on the rover's mast. It appears three dimensi...

This graphic shows the locations of the cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover.

This graph shows the ratio of concentrations of several elements in four different pairs of targets examined by Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) instruments on NASA Mars rovers Curiosity an...

Looking Back at the Crater Rim

This color image from NASA's Curiosity rover looks south of the rover's landing site on Mars towards Mount Sharp. This is part of a larger, high-resolution color mosaic made from images obtained by...

This computer-generated view based on multiple orbital observations shows Mars' Gale crater as if seen from an aircraft northwest of the crater.

This map shows the location of "Cumberland," the second rock-drilling target for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, in relation to the rover's first drilling target, "John Klein," within the southwestern...

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

An image taken at the "Hidden Valley" site, en-route to Mount Sharp, by NASA's Curiosity rover.

This sequence of images shows a dust-carrying whirlwind, called a dust devil, on lower Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater, as viewed by NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover during the summer afternoon of the ro...

This animation shows the major mission events of the Curiosity rover's landing on Mars. (Audio: music and mechanical sounds only)

This image from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover shows the "Amargosa Valley," on the slopes leading up to Mount Sharp on Mars.

NASA's Curiosity rover finds calcium deposits on Mars similar to those seen on Earth when water circulates in cracks and rock fractures.