Curiosity Postcard Celebrates Rover’s 5,000th Day on Mars

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover marked its 5,000th Martian day, or sol, with a new panoramic "postcard" from Mars. The image, cataloged as PIA26700 and credited to NASA/JPL-Caltech, is dated Sept. 16, 2026. While parked at a sand ridge nicknamed "Chocolatal," Curiosity used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas at two times of day. The first was taken Aug. 30, 2026, at 9:56 a.m. local Mars time; the second was taken Sept. 2, 2026, at 5:39 p.m. local Mars time. Those dates correspond to the 5,000th and 5,003rd sols of the mission.

After the images were sent back to Earth, the two panoramas were merged together. Color was added for an artistic interpretation of the scene, with blue representing the morning panorama and yellow representing the afternoon one. The resulting postcard is similar to past examples created with rover images, such as one taken in November 2021.

The rover's deck appears in the foreground, including its can-shaped UHF antenna, used for sending data to orbiting spacecraft, and its finned Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), a nuclear power source, at the rear. Curiosity's tracks can be seen trailing off in the distance. The rover is in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain within Gale Crater. This image looks down toward the crater floor, with the crater rim barely perceptible on the horizon.

Curiosity was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program portfolio. NASA directs readers to https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/ to learn more about Curiosity, with further exploration topics available from Photojournal.