Countdown Nears: Final Tests

This image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a hill with a central crater. Such features have been interpreted as both mud volcanoes (really a sedimentary structure) and as actual volca...

Curiosity performs the first investigation of active sand dunes on another planet. Studying the Bagnold Dunes on Mars will help scientists understand the physics of Martian dunes and how they move.

Workers roll one of two containers with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter equipment into the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, Kennedy Space Center.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been working on Mars since landing inside Eagle Crater on Jan. 25, 2004 (Universal Time; evening of Jan. 24, Pacific Standard Time).

This series of images shows warm-season features that might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity left the "Glenelg" area on July 4, 2013, on a "rapid transit route" to the entry point for the mission's next major destination, the lower layers of Mount Sharp.

Crater Floor Deposits in Promethei Terra

The Coloe Fossae region is a series of enclosed, intersecting canyons. The floors of the canyons in this image contain complex set of ridges and grooves that are generally parallel to the canyon wa...

This image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows sedimentary-rock layering in which a series of layers are all approximatel...

This image acquired on December 8, 2018 by NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows erosion of the surface revealing several shades of light toned layers, likely sedimentary deposits.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from the location where it landed in August 2012 to its location in mid-November 2015, approaching examples of dunes in the "Bagnold D...

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its Navigation Camera (Navcam) to record this stereo scene of a butte called "Mount Remarkable" and surrounding outcrops at a waypoint called "the Kimberley" inside...

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, nearing the 10th anniversary of its arrival at Mars, used its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera to obtain this view of an area with unus...

This 3D, or stereo anaglyph, view shows the upcoming science destination for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, a region dubbed "Glenelg," where three different types of material seen from orbit come tog...

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is Off to Mars!

This chain of collapse pits located on the southeast flank of Alba Patera, a volcanic complex, probably formed when empty underground lava tubes collapsed.

CRISM observations of this region of the Noctis Labyrinthus formation have shown indications of iron-bearing sulfates and phyllosilicate (clay) minerals.

This graphic depicts the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter measuring the temperature of a cross section of the Martian atmosphere as the orbiter passes above the...

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from the location where it landed in August 2012 to its location in December 2015, at examples of the Bagnold Dunes.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, its backshell and its heatshield are visible within this enhanced-color image of the Phoenix landing site taken on Jan. 6, 2010 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Ex...

This image acquired on January 10, 2019 by NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows large gullies on both the pole- and equator-facing slopes.

This image contrasts gullies and recurring warm-season slope flows appearing in the same crater, in the middle southern latitudes of Mars.

These images from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show several impact scars on Mars made by pieces of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft that the spacecraft shed just before entering ...

How before-and-after pictures led to the discovery of a fresh meteor impact crater on Mars.

Polygons are of great interest because they often indicate the presence of shallow ice or of desiccation such as in a mud flat. However, nature sometimes seems too clever for us.