Drag your mouse or move your phone to explore this 360-degree panorama provided by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. This view shows some of the rover’s first looks at a region that has only been viewed from space until now, and where the surface is crisscrossed with spiderweblike patterns.
00:00 Title
00:08 Intro
00:26 Labeled Image
00:50 Groundwater Rock Vein
01:43 Unlabeled Image
First seen in the years before Curiosity landed in 2012, these patterns are boxwork formations — a kind of low ridge, some just a few inches tall, created by groundwater as it soaks into subsurface rock cracks. That groundwater left behind minerals that accumulated in those cracks, hardening and becoming cementlike. Eons of sandblasting by Martian wind wore away the rock but not the minerals, revealing networks of resistant ridges within.This video will show you rover tracks left by Curiosity, some of the boxwork ridges and an example of a white mineral vein found running through a rock crack — another sign of how groundwater shaped this area.This panorama is stitched together from 291 individual images captured by the rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, 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.Note on best viewing: Not all browsers support 360-degree videos. YouTube supports playback on computers using Chrome, Firefox, MS Edge, and Opera browsers. For the best experience on a mobile device, play this video in the YouTube app. To improve the resolution, open the video settings (using the gear icon) and select the highest quality available.
