Landing Site Region

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 ...

The annotated area of Mars in this illustration holds near-surface water ice that would be easily accessible for astronauts to dig up. The water ice was identified as part of a map using data from ...

This color thumbnail image was obtained by NASA's Curiosity rover during its descent to the surface of Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT).

The Mars Climate Sounder, an instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter designed to monitor daily changes in the global atmosphere of Mars, made its first observations of Mars on March 24, 2006.

This image covers part of the floor of a large ancient impact crater, near the western rim.

From one side of the country to the other, through a snowstorm and other delays, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made its way to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for final processing and rehearsals ...

This image shows details of the lava covered plains near the equator of Mars. The darker looking area has a rough lava surface with all the shadows giving the region a darker appearance.

This picture of a heart-shaped pit was taken on 26 February 2008 by the CTX camera aboard MRO. It is approximately 2 km long. The pit is one of many adjacent to Hydaspis Chaos, a jumbled topographi...

This view taken from orbit around Mars shows the sand dune that will be the first to be visited by NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover along its route to higher layers of Mount Sharp.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity through the 43rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 19, 2012).

This map of the region around NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows the relative locations of several craters and the rover in May 2010.

This terrain is covered by pits and scallops (pits open on one side), perhaps due to collapse after sublimation of subsurface ice.

Phobos from 5,800 Kilometers

Blue dots on this map indicate sites of recurring slope lineae (RSL) in part of the Valles Marineris canyon network on Mars. RSL are seasonal dark streaks that may be indicators of liquid water. Th...

This image shows lava crumpled against the upstream side of an impact crater.

These images from the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter were taken before and after an apparent impact scar appeared in the area in March 2012. Comparing the Jan. 16, 2012, image...

Mars has extremely large temperature changes from winter to summer compared to the Earth. It gets cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere during the winter, but this ice is unsta...

Impact cratering and erosion combine to reveal the composition of the Martian underground by exposing materials from the subsurface.

This image acquired on October 1, 2020 by NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows several craters in Arabia Terra filled with layered rock.

Two parallel tracks left by the wheels of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover cross rugged ground in this portion of a Dec. 11, 2013, observation by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) ...

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity through the 56th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Oct. 2, 2012).

This image covers the margin of a lava flow in Elysium Planitia, the youngest flood-lava province on Mars. Flood lavas cover extensive areas, and were once thought to be emplaced extremely rapidly,...

Impact cratering and erosion combine to reveal the composition of the Martian underground by exposing materials from the subsurface.

These examples of one distinctive type of Martian gullies, called "linear gullies," are on a dune in Matara Crater, seen at different times of year to observe changes.

A regional dust storm visible in the southern hemisphere of Mars in this nearly global mosaic of observations made by the Mars Color Imager on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 25, 2012.