Desolate Landscape

NASA's Curiosity finds crystals, Opportunity celebrates her 5,000th day on Mars and the MarCO smallsats get solar arrays.

A beautiful sun rises on Florida's space coast as preparations are underway for mating the final solid rocket motor (SRM) to a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at the Vertical Integration Faci...

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover began close-up investigation of a target called "Marimba," on lower Mount Sharp, during the week preceding the fourth anniversary of the mission's Aug. 6, 2016, landing....

Artist concept of Mars Science Laboratory Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This set of images illustrates the twin cameras of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover (upper left), the Mastcam calibration target (lower center), and the locations...

This panorama is a mosaic of images taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on the NASA Mars rover Curiosity while the rover was working at a site called "Rocknest" in October and November 2012.

Researchers prepare for a test of the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument that will fly on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. The instrument uses a pulsed laser beam to vaporize a pinhea...

ASA's Curiosity Mars rover used the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on its mast to catch this look-back eastward at wheel tracks from driving through and past "Dingo Gap" inside Gale Crater.

For optimal communications during arrival at Mars, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, will launch after Thanksgiving 2011 and land on Mars in August 2012.

Five years since it landed near Mount Sharp on Mars in August 2017 and nearly three years since reaching the base of the mountain, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is climbing toward multiple layers of ...

Two spacecraft engineers stand with a group of vehicles providing a comparison of three generations of Mars rovers developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The setting is JPL...

This photo mosaic shows the scour mark, dubbed Goulburn, left by the thrusters on the sky crane that helped lower NASA's Curiosity rover to the Red Planet.

How a Martian mountain came to be: the story behind Curiosity's current location on Mars.

Curiosity shakes up a scoopful of dirt, dusts off the sampling system and investigates a shiny object on the surface of Mars.

This version of a self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover at a drilling site called "Buckskin" is presented as a stereographic projection, which shows the horizon as a circle. The MAHLI camera...

This image of terrain inside Mars' Gale Crater and the inset of the calibration target for the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity illustrate how false color can be used to make di...

In this project, you will build a paper helicopter. Then, just as NASA engineers had to try out different versions of the Mars helicopter before coming up with a final design, you will experiment w...

The dark, golf-ball-size object in this composite, colorized view from the ChemCam instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is a nickel-iron meteorite, as confirmed by analysis using laser pulses...

This illustration portrays some of the reasons why finding organic chemicals on Mars is challenging. Whatever organic chemicals may be produced on Mars or delivered to Mars face several possible mo...

On Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, lightning masts protect the 197-foot-tall United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket as it leaves behind the safety of the Vertical Integration Facility (...

On Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the 197-foot-tall United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket arrives on the launch pad at Space Launch Complex-41, situated near the Atlantic Ocean.

Side-by-side images depict NASA's Curiosity rover (left) and a moon buggy driven during the Apollo 16 mission.

The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., will analyze samples of material collected by the rover's arm.

This July 22, 2016, stereo scene from the Mastcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover shows boulders at a site called "Bimbe" on lower Mount Sharp. They contain pebble-size and larger rock fragments. Th...

Download a zip file of Curiosity’s Landing Site: Topographic Model of Gale Crater.