NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back a panorama offering the most detailed view yet of distant, wind-carved cliffs on Mars, the agency reported on Oct. 6, 2026. The scene was captured at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time on Aug. 11, the mission's 4,982nd Martian day, by the rover's Mastcam. It combines six images stitched together on Earth and, unlike most Mastcam pictures, was processed without white balancing to preserve the early morning look.

The features, called yardangs, lie in a layer stretching roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) across the northwestern reaches of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain Curiosity has been climbing since 2014. The rover recently reached 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of elevation, the most ever climbed on Mars. Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory described the layer as looking out of place, noting its unusual color and tilt; one idea is that it may be ash from ancient volcanic eruptions.

Curiosity is in the second year of its fifth extended mission. Scientists hope that sometime in 2027 the rover will reach the base of the yardangs and use its robotic arm to gather data on how the layer formed. Mount Sharp's layers record distinct periods of Mars' history, including lakes and streams that once covered the region.