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NASA has released a striking dawn image of Mars captured by the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam, showing wind-carved cliffs on Mount Sharp about an hour after sunrise.
The panorama looks across formations known as yardangs, ridges sculpted over immense stretches of time by wind-blown sand acting like sandpaper on rock. The layer in view may be ancient wind-blown sediment or volcanic ash that later hardened into stone, formed roughly three billion years ago, according to the mission team’s description.
The scene spans about 16 kilometres of terrain inside Gale Crater, the broad basin Curiosity has explored since landing in 2012. Low morning light sharpens the relief of the cliffs, throwing shadows that help scientists read the direction of ancient winds and the order in which the rock layers were laid down.
Curiosity has now climbed more than a kilometre in elevation up the slopes of Mount Sharp, the highest ascent achieved by any rover on Mars, according to NASA. Each new layer the rover passes is effectively a page in the planet’s history, recording a time when Mars was warmer and wetter before drying into the cold desert seen today.
The rover’s instruments examine the chemistry of these rocks as it climbs, searching for clues about how long water persisted on the surface and whether the environment could once have supported microbial life. No such life has been found, but the sedimentary record keeps refining the picture of a planet that changed gradually rather than all at once.
Curiosity has operated far beyond its original planned mission, surviving dust storms, wheel damage and more than a decade of harsh temperature swings. Its sibling rover, Perseverance, explores a different crater with a focus on caching samples.
Images like this dawn panorama serve two purposes. They are scientific data, encoding the structure of ancient landscapes. They are also a reminder that a machine built on Earth is still, after all these years, watching the sun rise on another world.
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