HiRISE Views Mars Curiosity Rover Climbing Mount Sharp

The car-sized rover can be seen as a blue speck in an image captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, set against a background of tan rocks and dark sand as it climbs lower Mount Sharp.

This newly released image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a view of the Mars Curiosity Rover amid rocky terrain on Mount Sharp.

The car-size rover, climbing up lower Mount Sharp toward its next destination, appears as a blue dab against a background of tan rocks and dark sand in the enhanced-color image from the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The exaggerated color, showing differences in Mars’s surface materials, makes Curiosity appear bluer than it really looks.

The image was taken on June 5, 2017, two months before the fifth anniversary of Curiosity’s landing near Mount Sharp on August 5 PDT (August 6, 2017, EDT and Universal Time).

When the image was taken, Curiosity was partway between its investigation of active sand dunes lower on Mount Sharp, and “Vera Rubin Ridge,” a destination uphill where the rover team intends to examine outcrops where hematite has been identified from Mars orbit.

The rover’s location that day is shown at https://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/2017/curiositys-traverse-map-through-sol-1717 as the point labeled 1717. Images taken that day by Curiosity’s Mast Camera (Mastcam) are at https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=1717&camera=MAST%5F.