NASA’s Curiosity Rover Catches Stunning Martian Dawn

NASA's Curiosity rover has released a new Mastcam panorama that gives the most detailed view yet of distant, wind-carved cliffs on Mars, features mission scientists have long wanted to see up close. The scene was captured on Aug. 11, the 4,982nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission, at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time, and it shows striking blue hues in the foreground as bright morning light illuminates crags known as yardangs on the horizon. The panorama is made from six individual images stitched together after being sent to Earth, and unlike most Curiosity Mastcam images, it was processed without white balancing to preserve the early morning appearance.

The yardang layer extends roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) across the northwestern reaches of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain Curiosity has been ascending since 2014. The rover recently passed another ascent milestone, reaching 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of elevation — the most ever climbed on Mars. As Curiosity draws closer to the yardangs, scientists expect even more striking imagery and hope to answer how these cliffs were created.

Mount Sharp is made up of layers that each record a distinct period of Mars' history. By studying them, scientists have learned more about lakes and streams that covered this part of the Red Planet billions of years ago; eventually the water dried up and left salty minerals behind. After new material stopped settling on the mountain, some of it may have been stripped away by wind, giving rise to the yardangs. Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the yardang layer looks out of place — it has the wrong color, its layers tilt at an odd angle, and it almost appears plastered on — but that makes it exciting to reach. No one is sure exactly what created the layer, he said, though one idea is that it may be ash deposited by ancient volcanic eruptions.

Curiosity is in the second year of its fifth extended mission, which began with an exploration of spiderweb-like boxwork ridges. The rover will spend most of the next year or so driving through layers enriched with sulfates and carbonates, both signs of ancient drying on the surface. Sometime in 2027, scientists hope to reach the base of the yardangs, where Curiosity will use its robotic arm to collect one-of-a-kind data on these mysterious features.

Curiosity was built by NASA JPL, 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 its Mars Exploration Program portfolio, and Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.