Countdown Nears: Final Tests

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of a meteoroid impact that was first detected by the agency’s InSight lander using its seismometer. This crater was formed on Aug. 30, 2021.

This series of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter successively zooms into "spider" features -- or channels carved in the surface in radial patterns -- in the south polar region of Mars.

This map shows the route on lower Mount Sharp that NASA's Curiosity followed between April 19, 2015, and Nov. 5, 2015. During this period the mission investigated silica-rich rock targets includin...

The arm and the remote sensing mast of the Mars rover Curiosity each carry science instruments and other tools for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission.

This image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows the western wall of a small pit that is located along the floor of a larger trough in Coprates Catena. Dark layers line the bottom; li...

This series of images shows warm-season features that might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows bright ripples line the topography in this region, formed within a past climate. Dark dunes and sand streaks, composed of basaltic sand, have moved and fill...

This 3D, or stereo anaglyph, view shows the parachute and back shell that helped guide NASA's Curiosity to the surface of Mars. The view was produced from images taken by the High Resolution Imagin...

With the spacecraft safely captured into orbit, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team transitions to the next critical phase -- aerobraking. Learn how engineers slow the spacecraft and precisely sha...

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity through the 56th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Oct. 2, 2012).

This picture of a heart-shaped pit was taken on 26 February 2008 by the CTX camera aboard MRO. It is approximately 2 km long. The pit is one of many adjacent to Hydaspis Chaos, a jumbled topographi...

This impact crater has gullies incised into its walls on the north and eastern sides. A couple of gullies on the north wall are unusual because a segment in the middle becomes wider than the upslop...

Syrtis Major Region

On this map of Mars, areas indicated in green are where spectrometers on spacecraft orbiting Mars have detected clay minerals and areas indicated in blue are where those spectrometers have detected...

Sand dunes such as those seen in this image have been observed to creep slowly across the surface of Mars through the action of the wind.

This near-global map was captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM. The yellow square indicates the Nili Fossae region ...

This sequence of images shows a blast zone where the sky crane from NASA's Curiosity rover mission hit the ground after setting the rover down in August 2012, and how that dark scar's appearance ch...

It's not only when trying to find a scientifically interesting place to land that the high-resolution images from HiRISE come in handy: it's also to identify potential hazards within a landing elli...

This movie clip shows a global map of Mars with atmospheric changes from Feb. 18, 2017, through March 6, 2017, a period when two regional-scale dust storms appeared. It combines hundreds of images ...

The new global mosaic, shown in a detail example at left, is stitched together from images taken by MRO’s Context Camera, which captures the Martian surface in long strips. The process is revealed ...

This image shows dunes near the north pole of Mars. The north pole is surrounded by a vast "sea" of basaltic sand dunes, and the dunes imaged here are similar to barchan dunes that are commonly fo...

This June 27, 2014, image from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on the rover's landing-ellipse boundary, which is superimposed on the image.

The bright landing platform left behind by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity in 2004 is visible inside Eagle Crater, where "Opportunity Lander" is indicated in this annotated, April 8, 2...

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been observing Mars since 2006, enabling it to document many types of changes, such as the way winds alter the appearance of this recent impact site. The orbi...

A dust storm continues to envelop the Red Planet and Curiosity’s labs are back in action.