NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Finds A Changing Landscape

NASA’s Curiosity rover explores Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8-kilometer-tall) mountain within the basin of Gale Crater on Mars. Curiosity’s Deputy Project Scientist, Abigail Fraeman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, gives viewers a descriptive tour of Curiosity's location. The panorama was captured by the rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on July 3, 2021, the 3,167th Martian day, or sol, of its mission. Curiosity landed nine years ago on August 5, 2012, with a mission to study whether different Martian environments could have supported microbial life in the ancient past, when long-lived lakes and groundwater existed within Gale Crater. For more about Curiosity, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/ and https://nasa.gov/msl/ Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS