Curiosity on the Road to Boxwork Formations

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to capture this panorama in morning light on March 9, 2025, the 4,476th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Steep hills on the left side of the panorama enclose wind-carved valleys on Mount Sharp, the mountain that Curiosity has been climbing for over a decade. Broken-up, rounded rocks throughout the foreground are part of the mountain's sulfate-bearing unit. The butte in the distance at right is nicknamed "Gould Mesa." A band of cliffs and dark ridges near the top of the butte may be the first glimpses of boxwork formations, a kind of feature created by groundwater flowing through large bedrock fractures in the ancient past. Assuming that is how they formed, these could represent the last gasps of water found on this region of Mars before the planet dried out completely. Before now, these features had only been viewed from orbiting spacecraft, to which they appeared as spiderweb-like fractures. This pattern of fractures stretches as long as 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers) across the side of Mount Sharp. The rover's team expects to study these formations up close throughout the rest of 2025. The color in this image has been adjusted to match lighting conditions as the human eye would see them on Earth. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA26552