Curiosity’s ChemCam Views Summit and Cliffs Beyond Gale Crater
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured this view of a mountain nearly 57 miles (91 kilometers) away and outside of Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed in 2012. The rover is currently in the foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain within the crater.
Estimated to be 8,202 feet (2,500 meters) tall, the mountain's summit just peeks over the crater rim in the panorama. It has never been viewed with this much detail. Toward the lower left, dark rocky outcrops are visible.
Curiosity captured the view with its black-and-white Remote Micro Imager, or RMI. Part of the rover's ChemCam instrument, RMI can be used like a small telescope to see distant features, creating a circular "spyglass" view. Ten RMI images taken on Aug. 28, 2025 (the 4,643rd Martian day, or sol of the mission) were stitched together to create the mosaic.
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. The U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed ChemCam in partnership with scientists and engineers funded by the French national space agency (CNES), the University of Toulouse, and the French national research agency (CNRS).
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