Tens of hundreds of thousands of miles past Earth, a nuclear-powered, car-sized rover is climbing a Martian mountain.
NASA’s Curiosity rover, whereas investigating Mars‘ previous, has snapped over 683,790 footage because it’s rumbled over 21 miles of unforgiving desert terrain since 2012, and a current view exhibits the space company’s robotic overlooking an enormous Martian wilderness.
Some 3.7 billion years in the past, a big object smashed into Mars, leaving the sizeable, 96-mile-wide Gale Crater we see at present. When the area’s floor rebounded after the highly effective collision, it left a central peak, Mount Sharp, which preserves layers of the intriguing, and watery, Mars previous.
From its perch within the foothills of the three.4-mile-high mountain, you’ll be able to see over an expanse of plains, referred to as Aeolis Palus, and past that the hilly partitions of Gale Crater. Within the foreground, Martian hills are shadowed within the low daylight.
This view, captured on March 18, 2025, was the Curiosity rover’s 4,484th Martian day, or Sol, on the Pink Planet. (A Martian Sol is a bit longer than a day on Earth, at 24 hours and 39 minutes.)
Mashable Mild Pace
The Curiosity rover’s view of the Martian panorama beneath, captured on March 18, 2025.
Credit score: NASA / JPL-Caltech
At this time, the Martian world we see is 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth. However proof gathered by rovers and spacecraft operated by NASA and different house companies exhibits this wasn’t all the time the case. An enormous Mars ocean could have blanketed a swath of the world, and lakes as soon as fed gushing rivers and streams.
As Curiosity has scaled Mount Sharp, it has encountered rocks with minerals (sulphates) that present when Mars started to dry out. It has additionally revealed ripple formations on the floor, which is compelling evidence of small waves breaking on lake shores billions of years in the past. Observations like this counsel that Mars as soon as was heat, moist, and fairly liveable earlier than it regularly reworked into the extraordinarily dry and frigid desert we see at present.
“Taken collectively, the proof factors to Gale Crater (and Mars on the whole) as a spot the place life — if it ever arose — might need survived for a while,” NASA defined.
Nonetheless at present, there is no sure proof microbial life ever existed on Mars. However Curiosity’s robotic sibling, the Perseverance rover, has discovered intriguing rock samples that might doubtlessly present proof of previous microbial exercise. (The samples should be robotically returned to Earth to examine.)
Curiosity is at the moment headed to a brand new vacation spot on Mount Sharp, a spot house to expansive and compelling “boxworks” formations. From house, they appear like spiderwebs. “It’s believed to have shaped when minerals carried by Mount Sharp’s final pulses of water settled into fractures in floor rock after which hardened,” NASA explained. “As parts of the rock eroded away, what remained had been the minerals that had cemented themselves within the fractures, leaving the weblike boxwork.”
What extra would possibly the boxworks reveal? Godspeed, Curiosity.
