Countdown Nears: Final Tests

This image, acquired on May 15, 2018, by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows relatively bright mounds scattered throughout darker and diverse surfaces in Chryse Planitia.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover can be seen in this image taken from space on May 31, 2019, by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In the image, Curiosity appears as a bluish speck.

These dark streaks, also known as “slope streaks,” resulted from dust avalanches in an area of Mars called Acheron Fossae. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured them ...

The long, sinuous raised ridges on this fan of material are thought to be inverted stream channels. These ridges may have been low-lying streambeds that hardened and then turned into ridges when th...

This comparison of before-and-after images shows two spots that likely appeared in connection with the Oct. 19, 2016, Mars arrival of the European Space Agency's Schiaparelli test lander. The image...

Dunes are often found on crater floors. In the winter, at high northern latitudes, the terrain is covered by carbon-dioxide ice (dry ice).

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Manager Jim Graf shakes the hand of JPL Associate Director for Programs, Project Formulation and Strategy Dr. Firouz Naderi. They are celebrating the spacecraft'...

A radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected widespread deposits of glacial ice in the mid-latitudes of Mars.

Near the lower left corner of this view is the three-petal lander platform that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit drove off in January 2004.

Follow along on a tour of the landing scene of NASA's Curiosity rover in this video made up of images from two NASA orbiters. The movie begins with a global image from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, ...

This 3D, or stereo anaglyph, view shows NASA's Mars rover Curiosity where it landed on Mars within Gale Crater, at a site now called Bradbury Landing. The view was produced from images taken by the...

This map shows the footprints of images taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as part of advance analysis of the area where NASA's InSight mission will land in 2018. The ...

The high resolution imaging science experiment (HiRISE) is one of six science instruments for NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

These two images taken by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) show Mars' two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, as seen from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's low orbit ar...

This animation blinks between two images of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander hardware around the mission's 2008 landing site on far-northern Mars.  By late 2017, dust obscures much of what was visible tw...

This HiRISE image shows gullies on a south-facing slope of a crater touched with late-Spring carbon dioxide frost. At this time of year, only the south-facing slopes of craters retain their frost, ...

This image acquired on January 13, 2019 by NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows a cluster of dust devil tracks on the flat ground below the south polar layered deposits, but none on the layers ...

This sequence of three HiRISE images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the growth of a branching network of troughs carved by thawing carbon dioxide over the span of three Martian years...

MRO took this image of layered, sedimentary rocks on the floor of an impact crater north of Eberswalde Crater. Billions of years ago there may have been a lake in this crater.

These dark streaks, also known as “slope streaks,” resulted from dust avalanches on Mars. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured them on Dec. 26, 2017.

This set of images shows what might be hardware from the Soviet Union's 1971 Mars 3 lander, seen in a pair of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Ma...

Valleys much younger than well-known ancient valley networks on Mars are evident near the informally named "Heart Lake" on Mars. This map presents color-coded topographical information overlaid ont...

Recurring slope lineae (RSL) are active flows on warm Martian slopes that might be caused by seeping water.

Hitting a moving target over 306 million miles away is no easy feat. Learn how JPL navigation engineers have guided the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter toward its mission-critical capture into orbit ar...

As on the Earth, many processes can move material down a Martian slope. This graphic compares seven different types of features observed on Mars that appear to result from material flowing or slidi...