Curiosity Passes a Kilometer of Climbing and Turns to Look Back
On Aug. 26, the 4,996th Martian day of its mission, NASA's Curiosity rover reached a milestone: 1 kilometer of elevation above the floor of Gale Crater. Nine days later, on Sept. 5, 2026, the rover captured a view looking back across that crater floor, with the rim visible in the distance — the long way down, rendered as a postcard.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Elevation one kilometer is worth reading against the terrain: Curiosity has been climbing the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, the roughly 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain inside Gale Crater, since 2014.
Which puts the milestone in perspective — a waypoint on a much longer climb. And the foreground of the picture has its own question attached: the size, composition and internal layering of the sand ridge's grains are what geologists will read to work out how the feature formed.