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NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have captured two 360-degree landscapes that highlight how the missions are revealing details of the Red Planet’s formation, watery past, and potential for life. Located 2,345 miles (3,775 kilometers) apart from each other on Mars — about the distance from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. — both rovers are exploring areas that are billions of years old. But as the nearly 15-year-old Curiosity reaches ever-younger terrain in the foothills of Mount Sharp, the 5-year-old Perseverance is venturing into some of the oldest landscapes in the entire solar system. By time-traveling in opposite directions, the rovers are filling in missing details about the planet’s history.

Stitched together from 1,031 images taken between Nov. 9 and Dec. 7, 2025, Curiosity’s 360-degree panorama offers a detailed look into a region filled with a vast network of boxwork formations: Resembling giant spiderwebs in orbiter images, the low ridges were created by groundwater that once flowed through large fractures in the bedrock. The minerals left behind hardened the rock along the fractures, resulting in erosion-resistant ridges.

Perseverance’s panorama focuses on a place nicknamed “Lac de Charmes,” which sits outside the rim of Jezero Crater. Taken between Dec. 18, 2025, and Jan. 25, 2026, 980 images were stitched together for a 360-degree view capturing the Jezero rim and ancient rocks around the crater.

Driven by Curiosity

Today, both of these landscapes are frigid deserts, but evidence of a more dynamic past hides within. When Curiosity landed on the floor of Gale Crater in 2012, it set out to determine whether Mars once had the conditions to support life. Within a year, a sample drilled from an ancient lakebed confirmed those conditions had been present, including the right chemistry and potential nutrients for microbes.

Since 2014, Curiosity has been ascending Mount Sharp. Towering 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the crater floor, the mountain first began forming when layers of sediment were deposited in a series of lakes. Long after those lakes dried up, ponds and streams returned several times, leaving a record in the mountain’s layers that formed in drier eras. Because the lowest layers are oldest and higher layers are youngest, Curiosity is essentially progressing back through geological time as it slowly climbs the mountain.

Last year, Curiosity’s team documented how they found that the mineral siderite might be storing carbon dioxide that once was part of a thicker, early atmosphere. Scientists had long suspected that carbonate minerals such as siderite formed when carbon dioxide dissolved into ancient lakes, but such deposits had only rarely been found.

The mission also announced the detection of three of the largest organic molecules ever found on Mars in a sample it had drilled in 2013. The discovery of these long-chain hydrocarbons — possibly the remnants of fatty acids — are a milestone in the search for more complex, prebiotic chemistry on the Red Planet.

And this year, they announced that a rock Curiosity drilled and analyzed in 2020 includes the most diverse collection of organic molecules ever found on the Red Planet. Of the 21 carbon-containing molecules identified in the sample, seven of them were detected for the first time on Mars.

Persevering for science

Perseverance landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater in 2021 to study the origin of ancient rocks within the crater and to hunt for evidence that microbial life once existed. Billions of years ago, molten rock cooled to form the floor of Jezero Crater. A river then fed a lake in the crater, leaving behind sediments where traces of microbes could have been preserved. In 2024, the mission discovered a rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” that was dotted with “leopard spots,” a pattern formed by chemical reactions that microbes are known to create in rocks here on Earth.

While Curiosity pulverizes its rock samples for analysis, Perseverance collects samples as intact rock cores, each about the size of a piece of blackboard chalk, and stores them in metal tubes. Aside from a backup set of 10 tubes Perseverance deposited in a sample depot, the rover keeps all its samples (23 so far) on board in its interior. Scientists hope to get these samples into labs on Earth where they can investigate them more fully with instruments far bigger and more complicated than those that can be sent to Mars.

Meanwhile, Perseverance continues to investigate other aspects of the Red Planet. For instance, this past fall, mission scientists shared the first recordings of electrical sparks in passing dust devils — a phenomenon that had only been theorized before Perseverance’s microphones caught them. A separate study detailed how one of Perseverance’s sensitive cameras was able to capture the first visible light auroras from the surface of another planet.

Both missions are looking forward to the next discoveries as they continue to unravel the secrets of Mars. Curiosity has left the boxwork region behind as it continues to explore a mountain layer enriched in salty minerals called sulfates; Perseverance will keep heading toward locations that hold exceptionally old terrain, including one called “Singing Canyon.”

Managed for NASA by Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and manages operations of both Curiosity and Perseverance on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.

To learn more about NASA’s exploration of Mars, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mars

News Media Contact

Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

2026-025

The second Artemis mission took four astronauts around the moon and back – the first crewed deep-space flight since 1972. Not everyone gets a chance to put on a space suit, but you can still be an important part of NASA’s human space exploration story by doing NASA science!

Volunteers with NASA’s citizen science projects have tested chili pepper plant varieties to grow in space, monitored active regions on the Sun, and analyzed data from experiments on how life adapts to the low-gravity, high-radiation environment of space. Participation does not require citizenship in any particular country – you only need a love of science and a desire to help. Join one of the projects below and help NASA make space travel safer and healthier.

Only a few minutes to spare? Space Umbrella is a great project for you. The brief online project tutorial will teach you how to read data collected by NASA’s Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission, which has been flying back and forth across Earth’s magnetosphere since 2015. By sorting data into in-magnetosphere and out-of-magnetosphere readings, you will help scientists learn more about how solar storms interact with our magnetosphere. Solar storms can pose a serious threat to astronauts, so this work can help missions minimize risks from radiation in space.

Are you a classroom teacher for students in grades 6-12? Through Growing Beyond Earth, middle and high school students and their teachers collaborate with Fairchild Botanical Garden scientists to grow candidate plants that are being evaluated as astronaut food. Today, on the International Space Station, astronauts tend to some of the same experimental leafy greens and hot pepper plants to unlock the secrets of how best to space farm terrestrial species. On really long missions, it won’t just be a question of easing the monotony of packaged/prepared foods – astronauts will have to grow their own food to supplement their diets. Sign up here to learn more.

Do you have some experience with data analysis? The Open Science Data Repository Analysis Working Groups need you to help analyze data from experiments about life in space. Join this international community of scientists, students, and everyone in between to help us understand how terrestrial life – from plants to mice and microbes to astronauts – responds to the space environment. 

Into ham radio? Join the team called Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) and use your ham radio skills to deploy your own personal space weather station! These stations are designed to be relatively low cost and easy to build and deploy by science professionals, educational institutions, and citizen scientists (you!). Your observations will be aggregated into a central database to help answer questions about how the ionosphere responds to the Sun and the neutral atmosphere.

There are many more ways you can do NASA science. Check out all the current projects supported by NASA that need your help answering questions about our universe, solar system, and Earth.

As NASA’s Artemis II astronauts zipped around the Moon in early April, they observed flashes of light caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. At the same time, volunteers for the NASA-funded Impact Flash project scanned the Moon with their own telescopes and sent their videos to scientists to share what they saw from Earth.

“We were incredibly grateful for the videos people submitted,” said Impact Flash project lead Ben Fernando, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The locations and brightness of flashes observed by different instruments at different locations together can help constrain the nature and origin of the impactors, as well as the craters they form. 

The Artemis II astronauts have splashed back down to Earth, so their observations of the Moon from space have come to a halt for now, but the Impact Flash team is just getting started. They need your continued help scanning the Moon to watch for flashes. If you have access to a telescope four inches in diameter or greater with video capabilities, your observations can make a difference. The more observations you submit, the better the team will be able to constrain the present-day impact rate on the Moon and how it changes over time. Instructions for making and uploading your observations can be found on the Impact Flash website.

In the future, the project team also plans to use your impact flash observations to study tremors on the Moon, similar to earthquakes. They’re called ‘moonquakes’ and they help us figure out what lies beneath the Moon’s surface.

“We are planning to send seismometers to the Moon to measure how the ground shakes,” said Fernando. “Your measurements of impact flashes will help us work out the sources of moonquakes we detect. This will help us work out what the Moon’s interior looks like.”

To collect data during the Artemis II mission, the Impact Flash investigators teamed up with several other groups of amateur astronomers, including the NASA-funded Kilo-nova Catchers, Exoplanet Watch, UNITE (Unistellar Network Investigating TESS Exoplanets), and Night Sky Network teams, as well as the Lunar Impact Flashes project, based at the National Research Council of Italy (IMATI-CNR). Thank you to all those who submitted data.

Grab your telescope and get started with Impact Flash: https://www.geodes.umd.edu/impactflash

The Impact Flash team acknowledges the work done by Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies-Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IMATI-CNR)/Italy (E. M. Alessi, M. T. Artesi) to set up the web page and A. Cook (Aberystwyth Univ., UK) and D. Koschny (Technical University of Munich, DE) for data curation. The IMATI-CNR team receives funding from the Italian Space Agency, corresponding to ESA’s (European Space Agency) Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer mission.

Listen to this audio excerpt from Peter Rossoni, Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System flight manager:

As a child, Peter Rossoni watched the Apollo missions launch with his family. In April 2026, he became a part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, helping enable communications as astronauts journeyed around the Moon.

Rossoni’s path to NASA began as he followed his parents’ footsteps into science. That foundation eventually led him to laser communications and NASA’s Artemis II test flight.

Today, Rossoni is the flight manager for the Orion Artemis II Optical Communication System at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Throughout Artemis II, he oversaw the first use of laser communications on a crewed deep space mission.

The optical terminal flew aboard the Orion spacecraft alongside NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Through the system, laser communications links transmitted video, photos, engineering, and science data, flight procedures, and crew communications to Earth from the lunar vicinity. In total, the terminal transferred over 450 gigabytes of data to Earth. That’s roughly equivalent to 100 high-definition movies.

During the approximately 10-day mission, Rossoni joined the mission control team to ensure smooth data flow from the laser communications terminal on Orion to the Mission Control Center at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“Communications is an important pillar of exploration. We’re venturing into deep space for longer periods of time, and we need that vital link back to the home base. Laser communications were proven to work in previous experiments, so the demonstration phase is over. Artemis II showed us what it can do operationally.”

Laser communications systems use invisible infrared light to pack more data into a single transmission. With downlink speeds of up to 260 megabits per second, the optical communications system was capable of transmitting a full-length 4K movie from the Moon to Earth in about a minute.

“Beyond supporting a crewed mission around the Moon, I’m excited to work with an amazing team of talented engineers and visionaries who understand that high-performance communications and networking is a key element of exploration infrastructure.”

Merging existing infrastructure with the next-generation system was no easy feat. While the system’s laser communications path operated in parallel to traditional radio communications, both tied into the same networks at the Mission Control Center and aboard Orion. The team developed solutions that would allow the systems to work together at the higher rates that laser communications can provide.

To prepare for liftoff, Rossoni and the optical flight and ground teams supported extensive testing activities, including practice runs simulating team and facility operations, the operational readiness reviews confirming the system’s terminal and ground segment, and assuring the teams work smoothly together for the mission. The result was a communications system with up to 100 times greater capacity, enhancing the connection between astronauts and their support teams, while freeing the radio communications systems for sensitive and critical data streams.

“A well-respected scientist at Goddard once said, ‘communications is the secret sauce behind all NASA missions. For Artemis II in particular, with the astronauts’ mission and safety at stake, it was critical to have robust communications to both enhance successful exploration and address any eventualities in the demanding environment of deep space. I had a deep sense of fulfillment when the Orion Artemis II optical communications system started working, and it kept growing as the mission progressed, with more and more objectives achieved.”

This shimmering region of star-formation, a close-up of the Trifid Nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth, was captured in intricate detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in an image released on April 20, 2026. The colors in Hubble’s visible light image, which marks the 36th anniversary of the mission’s launch on April 24, are reminiscent of an underwater scene filled with fine-grained sediments fluttering through the ocean’s depths.

Several massive stars, which are outside this field of view, have shaped this region for at least 300,000 years. Their powerful winds continue to blow an enormous bubble, a small portion of which is shown here, that pushes and compresses the cloud’s gas and dust, triggering new waves of star formation.

Learn more about the Trifid Nebula.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

OpenAI has won major concessions from its largest shareholder, Microsoft, that will allow it to sell products on AWS, while Microsoft get more cash in a revenue-share agreement.

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