Curiosity's Most Detailed Look Yet at Mars' Wind-Carved Cliffs
The ridges in the frame are yardangs: elongated ridges that wind erosion formed. Curiosity caught them, along with the Martian dawn, in a close-up drawn from a panorama released on Oct. 6, 2026. NASA calls it the most detailed view yet of distant, wind-carved Martian cliffs — features the mission's scientists had long been waiting to see up close.
It is a composite: Mastcam took six images on Aug. 11, the 4,982nd sol of the mission, and they were stitched together after being sent to Earth.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
A yardang is a landscape made by subtraction — what you see is what the wind left behind after carrying the rest away, and after enough of that the leftover shape starts to look deliberate.
The mechanism is the dull part, though. The interesting claim is the view: NASA describes the sharpest look yet at cliffs the mission's scientists had wanted to see properly, which makes this a story about optics as much as about rock.