NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its ChemCam instrument to capture Peace Vallis, an ancient river channel descending Gale Crater’s rim, on Sept. 1, 2025 (the 4,647th Martian day, or sol, of the mission). The channel was about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from Curiosity as it explores the foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain.
The dark features scattered just left of center within the channel are rocky outcrops. While Curiosity has taken pictures of Peace Vallis in the past, this is the first time details like these have been seen within it. Water and sediment are believed to have flowed down Peace Vallis into Gale Crater billions of years ago, creating a fan of sediment across the crater floor. Studying the crater’s watery past is part of Curiosity’s overall mission to understand where and how well the ancient Martian landscape could have supported microbial life, if any ever formed there.
ChemCam is equipped with the Remote Micro Imager, or RMI, a black-and-white camera that can be used like a small telescope to see distant features, creating a circular “spyglass” image. Ten RMI images were stitched together on Earth into a mosaic to create the panorama seen here.
Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed ChemCam in partnership with scientists and engineers funded by the French national space agency CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), the University of Toulouse, and the French national research agency (CNRS).
For more about Curiosity, visit:
science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity.