Curiosity’s latest panorama sharpens the view of a Martian rock layer that looks out of place and may have formed from ancient volcanic ash.
A band of wind-carved cliffs stretches roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) across the northwestern reaches of Mount Sharp on Mars, and NASA’s Curiosity rover is climbing toward it. A newly released panorama offers the most detailed view yet of these formations, known as yardangs, which mission scientists have long wanted to examine up close.
“The yardang layer looks out of place. It’s the wrong color, the layers tilt at an odd angle, and it almost appears plastered on,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But that’s what makes it exciting to reach. No one is sure exactly what created this layer, but one idea is it may be ash deposited by ancient volcanic eruptions.”
Curiosity has been ascending the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain since 2014. Each layer records a different period in Mars’ history, allowing scientists to reconstruct a time billions of years ago when lakes and streams covered this region. As the water dried up, it left salty minerals behind. Once new material stopped accumulating on the mountain, wind may have stripped some of it away to create the yardangs.
Mars in its morning colors
The panorama captures the distant cliffs in bright morning light, with blue hues across the foreground. Curiosity’s Mastcam took the six images that make up the scene at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time on Aug. 11, the mission’s 4,982nd Martian day, or sol.
The images were transmitted to Earth and stitched together. Unlike most Mastcam imagery, the panorama was processed without the color adjustment known as white balancing, preserving its early morning appearance.
A record climb toward the yardangs
The rover recently reached another milestone in its ascent, gaining 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in elevation, the most ever climbed on Mars. It is now in the second year of its fifth extended mission, which began with an exploration of spiderweb-like formations called boxwork ridges. For most of the next year or so, Curiosity will drive through layers enriched with sulfates and carbonates, both signs of ancient drying at the surface.
Scientists expect increasingly detailed images as the rover approaches the cliffs. They hope to reach the base of the yardangs sometime in 2027, where Curiosity will be able to use its robotic arm to collect unique data about the formations and investigate how they came to be.
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