Curiosity's First 360-Degree View of Boxwork Patterns
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured this 360-degree view after arriving at a region crisscrossed by hardened low ridges called boxwork patterns. The panorama is stitched together from 291 individual images the rover's Mast Camera, or Mastcam, captured between May 15 and May 18, 2025 (the 4,451st Martian day, or sol, of the mission and the 4,454th sol). The color in these images has been adjusted to match the lighting conditions as the human eye would see them on Earth.
Click here to explore the scene in a 360-degree video.
When viewed from space, the boxwork patterns look a bit like spiderwebs. They have fascinated scientists since before Curiosity's 2012 landing on the Red Planet and are believed to have formed from groundwater trickling through rock cracks billions of years ago. Minerals left behind by the water hardened like cement within the rock; after eons of sandblasting by wind, the rock was carved away, revealing networks of resistant ridges within.
Curiosity's tracks can be seen in the middle of the image. In the distance to the right is a butte nicknamed "Texoli." Far in the distance at the top center of the image is the rim of Gale Crater. Since 2014, Curiosity has been exploring the foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain within the crater.
Curiosity was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.
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