NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured a view looking back across the floor of Gale Crater toward the crater rim on Sept. 5, 2026, its 5,006th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Nine days earlier, on Aug. 26 (Sol 4,996), the rover reached 1 kilometer of elevation above the crater floor, a mission milestone, according to NASA.

Curiosity has been climbing the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a mountain about 3 miles (5 kilometers) tall inside Gale Crater, since 2014. The panorama, made from 95 individual images taken by the rover's Mast Camera, or Mastcam, shows a sand ridge across the foreground and a trench left by the rover's right front wheel at the right. NASA says the geologic layering inside the ridge, along with the size and composition of its sand grains, will offer clues to how the feature formed. The color was adjusted to match lighting as the human eye would see it on Earth.

The rover was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of the agency's Mars Exploration Program. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.