A spacecraft orbiting Mars has recently captured a captivating image: a rover traversing the planet’s dusty terrain.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2006, took a new photo depicting the Curiosity rover — roughly the size of a car — ascending the slopes of Mount Sharp, a formidable 3.4-mile-high mountain located at the heart of Gale Crater.
As per NASA, this might be the first occasion that one of its orbiters has recorded Curiosity while it was actively navigating the Martian surface.
The image was obtained using MRO’s advanced High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which can detect objects as small as a kitchen table from a distance of 160 to 200 miles above the ground. In the picture, Curiosity is visible as a dark dot, with a clear trail showing its route — a mark left by its six wheels as it crossed the dusty ground.
The tracks extend roughly 1,050 feet (320 meters) and were produced over the span of 11 distinct drives. The orbiter captured this image on February 28, 2025.
Since its arrival in 2012, Curiosity has journeyed more than 21 miles across Mars’ rugged desert landscape. Its mission is to investigate Mount Sharp and study the planet’s ancient climate and geology. Throughout the years, Curiosity has revealed compelling evidence that Mars once experienced floods, lakes, rivers, and even rainfall. For example, the rover identified ripple patterns in sedimentary rocks — indicators of small waves gently washing against ancient lake shores. These observations imply that billions of years ago, Mars was a warm and wet environment, drastically different from the cold, dry desert it has become today. (At present, Mars is approximately 1,000 times drier than Earth’s driest desert.)
Curiosity is now en route to a new section of Mount Sharp, where distinctive “boxwork” formations are located. From an orbital perspective, these structures appear similar to intricate spiderwebs. Scientists theorize that they developed when minerals, transported by the last water flows on Mount Sharp, filled rock fissures. Over time, as the surrounding rock eroded, the hardened mineral veins remained, resulting in the eye-catching boxwork patterns.
The growing evidence from NASA’s rovers makes it increasingly evident that Mars was once a planet that could have supported life — at least microbial life. Nevertheless, despite numerous intriguing hints, scientists have yet to find conclusive proof that life ever existed there.
Currently, Mars remains a realm inhabited solely by robots — some still operational, others long silent.