At first glance, this view may look like a vista from a bluff in the southwestern United States.
But those aren’t ordinary mountains in the distance. What appears to be a sierra is in fact the rim of an enormous crater on Mars, formed when an asteroid slammed into the Red Planet billions of years ago. The vantage point is from the slopes of the three-mile-tall Mount Sharp, sculpted over time within the crater after the ancient collision.
NASA‘s Curiosity rover captured this extremely wide snapshot as it traversed its extraterrestrial stomping grounds in Gale Crater this February. The agency has since converted that data into a 30-second immersive video, which you can watch further down in this story.
It’s perhaps the next best thing to actually hiking the chilly desert roughly 140 million miles away in space.
“You can imagine the quiet, thin wind,” said NASA in a post on X, “or maybe even the waves of a long-gone lake lapping an ancient shore.”
NASA’s Curiosity rover snaps a selfie image on lower Mount Sharp in Gale crater in August 2015.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
Since its mission launched in 2011, Curiosity, a Mini Cooper-sized lab on six wheels, has traveled about 352,000,020 miles: some 352 million whizzing through space and another 20 rumbling over Martian terrain.
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At the time when Curiosity drank up this scenery, it was climbing a region of Mount Sharp known as the sulfate-bearing unit. This area is chock full of salty minerals. Scientists think streams and ponds left them behind as the water dried up billions of years ago. Studying this geology offers clues about how and why Mars may have transformed from a more Earth-like world to the frozen desert it is today.
Almost exactly a year ago, the rover accidentally discovered elemental sulfur, its wheels crushing the material to expose a bed of yellow crystals. When pure sulfur is made naturally on Earth, it’s usually associated with superheated volcanic gases and hot springs. Another way it can form is through interactions with bacteria — a.k.a. life.
“We don’t think we’re anywhere near a volcano where the rover is,” Abigail Fraeman, deputy project scientist on the Curiosity mission, told Mashable in September, “so that is a puzzling feature to find in this particular location.”
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A 30-second video in the above X post showcases the vast Martian panorama.
Now Curiosity is on its way to a new destination where it will study an unusual landscape, called a “boxwork.” This region likely necessitated warm groundwater to form. And where there’s water, there’s potential for life — at least the kind scientists know about. Researchers wonder if the boxwork could have hosted ancient single-celled microorganisms.
From Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images, the land feature looks like a spiderweb of ridges, spanning several miles. Dark sand fills the hollow spaces among the lattice. Scientists believe this particular boxwork may have formed when minerals in the last trickles of water seeped into surface rock and hardened. As the rocks weathered over the ages, minerals that had cemented into those cracks remained, leaving behind the weird pattern.
The rover’s science team doesn’t expect Curiosity to reach its destination until at least late fall, said Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, a planetary geologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, in the mission log.
“Our drives are long right now,” O’Connell-Cooper wrote, “but we are still taking the time to document all of the wonderful geology as we go, and not just speeding past all of the cool things!”
