Mars hit 8:30 in the morning, and Curiosity was looking at its next big target. On Aug. 11, 2026, NASA's rover photographed sunlight striking a line of wind-carved ridges called yardangs on the horizon, while the ground in front of it still looked blue in the early light. NASA released the panorama on Oct. 6.
The panorama is also a preview: those cliffs may hold one of the oddest chapters in Mount Sharp's history.
A layer that doesn't fit
NASA built the view from six Mastcam frames taken on the mission's 4,982nd Martian day, or sol. Most Mastcam images are white balanced, which means the colors are adjusted to look the way they would under Earth daylight. This one was left as captured, so you see the scene the way a Martian dawn actually lit it.
The yardangs belong to a layer that runs about 10 miles (16 km) across the northwestern part of Mount Sharp. That mountain is about 3 miles tall and is made of rock layers stacked one on top of another, and Curiosity has been climbing it since 2014. Scientists read those layers like pages in a record of Mars' climate. NASA says the mountain may have started eroding before the yardang layer was laid down, which would leave a gap in that record.
"The yardang layer looks out of place," project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said. "It's the wrong color, the layers tilt at an odd angle, and it almost appears plastered on." Nobody knows for sure what made it. One idea is ash from ancient volcanic eruptions, similar to deposits found along Mars' equator.
Not there yet
Curiosity hasn't reached the cliffs, and NASA doesn't call this its most detailed look at them. The yardangs here are distant, and NASA added a cropped close-up to show them better. Curiosity also photographed this same Yardang Unit back in November 2024, in an 18-image mosaic.
The rover's actual progress is a good story on its own. It recently passed 0.6 miles (1 km) of climbing above the crater floor, which NASA says is the most any rover has climbed on Mars. It's now in the second year of its fifth mission extension. Over the next year or so it will cross layers rich in sulfates and carbonates, minerals that point to an ancient surface drying out.
NASA hopes Curiosity will reach the base of the yardangs sometime in 2027 and study them with its robotic arm. That's a target, not a promise, for a rover that has been on Mars for more than a decade. The rover has tested a volcanic idea like this before. In 2015 it drilled a rock nicknamed Buckskin, and its CheMin instrument, which identifies minerals by shining X-rays through powdered rock, found tridymite, a rare high-temperature mineral that a 2022 study traced to an explosive eruption that dropped ash into Gale crater's ancient lake.
Sources
- 1.NASA's Curiosity Rover Catches Stunning Martian Dawn · NASA
- 2.NASA's Curiosity Captures Dawn Breaking on Wind-Carved Cliffs · NASA Science Photojournal
- 3.Curiosity Views the Yardang Unit · NASA Science Photojournal
- 4.Study: Explosive volcanic eruption produced rare mineral on Mars · Rice University
Reported by the WattsUpNext desk from the sources linked below. Spot an error? Tell us at corrections@wattsupnext.com.
The WattsUpNext Brief
Get stories like this in your inbox.
One email each weekday, only the topics you choose. Real news, sourced, no fluff. Unsubscribe in one click.
