NASA’s Curiosity probe used two cameras to create this self-portrait in front of “Monte Mirco,” a 20-foot-high rock formation.
This Valles Marineris hemisphere view of Mars, from July 9, 2013, is actually a mosaic of 102 images from the Viking Orbiter. In the center is the Valles Marineris valley system, which is more than 2,000 km long and 8 km deep.
This 2016 selfie shows the Curiosity Mars rover installed at the Quela drilling site in the Murray Buttes area below Mount Sharp.
This image of a preserved river channel on Mars was captured by an orbiting satellite, with color overlays to show different altitudes. Blue is low and yellow is high.
The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission captured this 2018 image of the Korolev crater, which is more than 50 miles in diameter and filled with water ice near the North Pole.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to get this view of an area of unusual texture on the south floor of Gale Crater.
The cooled lava helped preserve the imprint of where dunes once moved in the southeastern region of Mars. But it also appears to be a “Star Trek” icon.
Although Mars is not as geologically active as Earth, its surface features have been heavily shaped by winds. These wind-carved features, called yardangs, are common on the Red Planet. On the sand, the wind forms small ripples and dunes. In the thin atmosphere of Mars, the light is not scattered much, so the shadows cast by the yard are sharp and dark.
These small, hematite-rich concretes were found near Fram crater, visited by NASA’s Opportunity spacecraft in April 2004. The area shown is 1.2 inches in diameter. View from Opportunity’s Robotic Arm Microscopy Imager, with color information added from the rover’s panoramic camera. These minerals indicate that Mars had a watery past.
This image shows the seasonal flows in Valles Marineris on Mars, called Recurrent Slope Lines, or RSLs. These Martian landslides appear on the slopes in the spring and summer.
Mars is known to have dust storms circling the planet. These 2001 images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet’s appearance as haze from dust storm activity spread to the global south.
This composite image, looking up over Mount Sharp’s regions, was captured in September 2015 by NASA’s Curiosity rover. In the foreground is a long ridge teeming with hematite. Beyond that is a rolling plain rich in clay minerals. Behind it are many rolling hills, all of which are rich in sulfate minerals. The changing minerals of these layers indicate a changing environment in early Mars, although they all indicate exposure to water billions of years ago.
InSight’s seismometer first recorded an “earthquake” in April 2019.
From its position on a hillside, Opportunity recorded this 2016 image of the Martian dust demon writhing in the valley below. The view returns to the rover trails to the northern slope of the Knudsen Range, part of the southern edge of Marathon Valley.
HiRISE captured stratigraphic sediments and a bright ice cap at the north pole of Mars.
Indigo Patera is a region of Mars where dunes and ripples move quickly. HiRISE, aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, continues to monitor this region every two months to see changes on seasonal and annual timescales.
NASA’s Curiosity rover captured the highest resolution panorama of the surface of Mars in late 2019. It includes more than 1,000 images and 1.8 billion pixels.
This image, which collects data from two instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, depicts an orbital view of Mars’ north polar region. The ice-rich polar cap is 621 miles in diameter, and the dark bands are deep basins. To the right of center is a large ravine, Chasma Boreale, roughly cutting through the ice cap. Chasma Boreale is located regarding the length of the famous Grand Canyon in the United States and reaches a depth of two kilometers.
This image taken by the HiRISE camera in November 2013 is dominated by a cool, exciting crater. The crater spans nearly 100 feet and is surrounded by a large radioactive eruption zone. As the terrain in which the crater formed is dusty, the new crater appears blue in the image-enhanced color, due to the removal of reddish dust in this region.
This dark hill, called Ireson Hill, is located in the Murray Formation at the bottom of Mount Sharp, near where NASA’s Curiosity rover examined the linear sand dunes in February 2017.
Are cookies and cream on Mars? No, these are just polar dunes scattered with ice and sand.
The cloud in the center of this image is actually a dust tower that occurred in 2010 and was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The blue and white clouds are water vapor.
HiRISE captured this image of a mile-sized crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars in June 2014. The crater shows frost on all of its south-facing slopes in late winter as Mars approaches spring.
The two largest earthquakes detected by NASA’s InSight appear to have originated from an area of Mars called Cerberus Fossae. Scientists have already detected signs of tectonic activity here, including landslides. This image was taken with the HiRISE camera on NASA’s orbiting planet Mars.
This image is the first image taken from the surface of Mars. It was captured on July 20, 1976 by the Viking 1 lander shortly following it touched down on the planet.
