Mars on Earth

The two prominent mesas in this Aug. 18, 2016, view of Mars' "Murray Buttes" region from the Curiosity Mars rover's Mastcam are about 260 feet (about 80 meters) apart. The one on the right is about...

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has collected its first sample from the base of Mount Sharp.

Since landing on Mars in August 2012, NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring 3-mile-high Mt. Sharp in Gale Crater.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity extended its robotic arm on Aug. 20, 2012, for the first time on Mars and used its Navigation Camera (Navcam) to capture this view of the extended arm.

This grouping of two test rovers and a flight spare provides a graphic comparison of three generations of Mars rovers developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The setting is ...

This stereo view from NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover shows the downwind side of a dune about 13 feet high within the Bagnold Dunes on Mars. The image appears three-dimensional when viewed through red-...

This color full-resolution image showing the heat shield of NASA's Curiosity rover was obtained during descent to the surface of Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT).

This side-by-side comparison shows the X-ray diffraction patterns of two different samples collected from rocks on Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover (blue line) and locations where the rover's ChemCam instrument detected the element boron (dots, colored by abundance of boron accordi...

This artist's animation shows how orbiters over Mars will monitor the landing of NASA's Curiosity rover. (No audio)

This image is from a test series used to characterize the 100-millimeter Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity rover. It was taken on Aug. 23, 2012, and looks south-southwest from the rover's landing site.

This animated blink comparison shows five versions of observations that NASA's Curiosity rover made about one hour apart while Mercury was passing in front of the sun on June 3, 2014. Two sunspots...

This color image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows an area excavated by the blast of the Mars Science Laboratory’s descent stage rocket engines

This image from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows an example of a type of geometrically distinctive feature that researchers are using Curiosity to exami...

This close-up view shows NASA's Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The image was captured by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbite...

With the wheels and suspension system already installed onto one side of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity the previous day, spacecraft engineers and technicians prepare the other side's mobility subsyst...

Pictured here is Clara Ma (in front row on the right) and her sister Remmy Ma with engineers Suparna Mukherjee, Jaime Waydo and then Julie Towsend (back row).

This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the "Big Sky" site, where its drill collected the mission's fifth taste of Mount Sharp. It was taken on Oct. 6, 2015, PDT.

At the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians, using an overhead crane, separate the two components of the aeroshell, an element of NASA's Mars ...

The artist's animation depicts how NASA's Curiosity rover will communicate with Earth during landing. As the rover descends to Mars, it will send out basic radio-frequency tones that go directly to...

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover spotted this dust devil with one of its Navigation Cameras around 11:35 a.m. local Mars time on Aug. 9, 2020 (the 2,847th Martian day, or sol, of the mission).

This graphic shows tenfold spiking in the abundance of methane in the Martian atmosphere surrounding NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, as detected by a series of measurements made with the Tunable Laser...

Sulfates are found overlying clay minerals in sediments within Columbus Crater, a depression that likely hosted a lake in the past.

NASA's Curiosity rover pinged the ground with neutrons for the first time, a process called active neutron sounding, on Aug. 17, 2012.

Mars Parachute Testing in World's Largest Wind Tunnel