Rover
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NASA
NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers Field of Honeycomb Textures
As NASA’s Curiosity rover recently began climbing up a Martian valley nicknamed “Valle Grande,” it sent back images that were a familiar sight to mission scientists: honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, each one about 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 centimeters) across. The mission has spotted small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the…
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NASA
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reads Record of Ancient Mars Impacts
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has uncovered evidence that a 245-foot-thick (75-meter-thick) stack of ancient rock on the rim of Jezero Crater was built by repeated asteroid impacts. Referred to as the “Broom Point member” by the rover’s science team, this sequence of layered bedrock is likely more than 3.9 billion years old, making it among the oldest terrain ever examined…
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NASA
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4920-4926: Surveying the Bands
Written by William Farrand, Senior Research Scientist, Space Science Institute Earth planning date: Friday, June 12, 2026 Rather than going from stage to stage at a music festival to hear different bands playing different varieties of music, Curiosity has been ascending up Mount Sharp through physical bands of exposed rocks with textural and tonal differences. Planning for sols 4920 and…
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NASA
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4886-4892: Ingenuity and Perseverance, Curiosity Style
Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator Earth planning date: Friday, May 8, 2026 While we know the monikers Ingenuity and Perseverance are attached to our sister helicopter and rover on the Mars 2020 mission, those characteristics were in full force with Curiosity over the past week. The science we achieved this week was enabled by the ingenuity of…
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NASA
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4812-4819: Back Into the Hollows
Written by Diana Hayes, Graduate student at York University, Toronto Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 20, 2026 This has been a pretty routine week for Curiosity. As was mentioned last week, we’re now in the final phase of the boxwork exploration campaign. We’re currently making our way toward the eastern contact of the boxwork formation with the surrounding geology, which we…
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NASA
NASA’s Perseverance Now Autonomously Pinpoints Its Location on Mars
There is no GPS at the Red Planet, but a new technology called Mars Global Localization lets Perseverance determine precisely where it is — without human help. Imagine you’re all alone, driving along in a rocky, unforgiving desert with no roads, no map, no GPS, and no more than one phone call a day for someone to inform you exactly…
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NASA
Visualizing Perseverance’s AI-Planned Drive on Mars
Description This animation of NASA’s Perseverance was created with the Caspian visualization tool using data acquired during an 807-foot (246-meter) drive on the rim of Jezero Crater made by the rover on Dec. 10, 2025, the 1,709th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The mission’s “drivers,” or rover planners, use the information to understand the Perseverance’s autonomous decision-making process during its…
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NASA
Wind-Sculpted Landscapes: Investigating the Martian Megaripple ‘Hazyview’
Written by Noah Martin, Ph.D. student and Candice Bedford, Research Scientist at Purdue University While much of Perseverance’s work focuses on ancient rocks that record Mars’ long-lost rivers and lakes, megaripples offer a rare opportunity to examine processes that are still shaping the surface today. Megaripples are sand ripples up to 2 meters (about 6.5 feet) tall that are mainly…
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NASA
NASA JPL Unveils Rover Operations Center for Moon, Mars Missions
The center leverages AI along with JPL’s unique infrastructure, unrivaled tools, and years of operations expertise to support industry partners developing future planetary surface missions. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Wednesday inaugurated its Rover Operations Center (ROC), a center of excellence for current and future surface missions to the Moon and Mars. During the launch event, leaders…
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NASA
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4682-4688: Seven Mars Years
Written by Diana Hayes, Graduate Student at York University, Toronto Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 10, 2025 This week was one of seasonal changes and milestones for the mission. As was mentioned several weeks ago, Mars has now moved out of its “cloudy season” and is transitioning into the “dusty season” as the planet moves closer to the Sun. This means…
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