Desolate Landscape

This oblique view of the lower mound in Gale crater shows layers of rock that preserve a record of environments on Mars.

A Russian-built, neutron-shooting instrument on the Curiosity rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will check for water-bearing minerals in the ground beneath the rover.

Video of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Nov. 26, 2011, onboard an Atlas V rocket.

This image from Curiosity's Mast Camera shows NASA's Curiosity rover just after discarding a soil sample as part of its first "decontamination" exercise.

This sped-up movie from the Curiosity rover shows Phobos (the larger of Mars' two moons) passing in front of smaller Deimos. (No audio)

This selfie was taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on Feb. 26, 2020 (the 2,687th Martian day, or sol, of the mission). The crumbling rock layer at the top of the image is the Greenheugh Pediment,...

This May 22, 2015, view from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) in NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the "Marias Pass" area where a lower and older geological unit of mudstone -- the pale zone in the center...

Download a PDF of the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Fact Sheet.

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.

This graph shows the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Mars, as measured by the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station on NASA's Curiosity rover.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity appears as a bluish dot near the lower right corner of this enhanced-color view from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on...

The rock "Ithaca" shown here, with a rougher lower texture and smoother texture on top, appears to be a piece of the local sedimentary bedrock protruding from the surrounding soil in Gale Crater.

As the Curiosity rover hurdles toward Mars on the last leg of its journey, the Mars Science Laboratory Mission Operations Team assemble in Mission Control at the Space Flight Operations Facility at...

​ NASA's Curiosity rover used an instrument called SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) to detect seasonal changes in atmospheric methane in Gale Crater. The methane signal has been observed for nearly...

Curiosity remains busy on Mars by checking out her instruments and getting ready for her first test drive.

This stereoscopic anaglyph image was created from a left and right stereo pair of images of the Mars Science Laboratory mission's rover, Curiosity. The image was taken May 26, 2011, in Spacecraf...

This self-portrait shows the deck of NASA's Curiosity rover from the rover's Navigation camera.

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.

Mawrth Vallis was considered as a landing site for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Download a coloring sheet of NASA MAVEN orbiter and Curiosity rover working together at Mars.

This side-by-side comparison shows the X-ray diffraction patterns of two different samples collected from rocks on Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover.

On "Vera Rubin Ridge," to determine whether dust coatings are hiding rocks' hematite content, the Mastcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover took this Sept. 17, 2017, image of a rock surface that had b...

A June 2012 revision of the landing target area for Curiosity, the big rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, reduces the area's size.

Teachers have fun putting their skills to the test in this hands-on activity during the Curiosity Educator Workshop at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif

On this image of the broken rock called "Tintina," color coding maps the amount of mineral hydration indicated by a ratio of near-infrared reflectance intensities measured by the Mast Camera (Mastc...