NASA's Curiosity rover captures Mars dawn from record-breaking height after climbing a mile up Mount Sharp

From the Newshound archive · first published 7 October 2026 · last updated 9 October 2026.

NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back a striking image of sunrise on Mars, shot about an hour after dawn broke over wind-carved crags on the surface of the Red Planet. The six-wheeled, car-sized rover took the picture using its Mastcam camera while climbing Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, having now gained more than a mile in elevation — the highest any rover has ever climbed on Mars. Planetary scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the jagged peaks visible in the image are a rock layer unlike anything Curiosity has passed through before. The image offers a window into a landscape shaped roughly three billion years ago.

The bright crags are likely ancient windblown sediment — possibly volcanic ash — that hardened into rock and was then carved by wind into ridges called yardangs.

The yardang layer stretches about 10 miles across the northwestern reaches of Mount Sharp and sits above a geological gap, meaning it was deposited after earlier layers had already eroded away.

Curiosity first landed in Gale Crater in 2012 and has been scaling the 3-mile-tall Mount Sharp since 2014, steadily building the most detailed record of Mars's geological past ever assembled.