Curiosity has now climbed 1 kilometer up Mount Sharp, the most ever on Mars

Curiosity has gained 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of elevation since it began climbing Mount Sharp, a total NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory describes as the most ever climbed on Mars. The rover is in the second year of its fifth extended mission, and it is still driving uphill through the layered rock of Gale Crater. JPL announced the milestone on Oct. 6, 2026, in a feature built around a dawn panorama.

JPL’s wording is specific to this rover: it “recently passed another milestone in its ascent,” with no other vehicle named.

Stitched from six frames at 8:30 a.m. Mars time

The occasion for the announcement was an image. Curiosity’s Mastcam captured the panorama on Aug. 11, 2026, the 4,982nd Martian day of the mission, at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time. Six frames were stitched together after reaching Earth, and the team chose not to white-balance the result, which keeps the cold, early-morning look of the light. NASA’s feature calls that an artistic choice.

What the picture shows is a horizon of wind-carved crags called yardangs, lit from the side by the rising Sun. They belong to a layer on the northwestern part of Mount Sharp that extends about 10 miles (16 kilometers) across.

A 3-mile mountain climbed since 2014

Mount Sharp is the central peak inside Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed on Aug. 6, 2012. In the Oct. 6 feature, JPL describes it as a roughly 3-mile (5-kilometer) mountain that the rover has been ascending since 2014. NASA’s older description of the mountain puts its height at about 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) above the crater floor and calls its stratified layers a “history book of sequential chapters” recording the conditions under which each one formed.

The one-kilometer figure is elevation gain, not distance driven. A photo caption in the feature measures it from the crater floor, so every ridge, hollow and detour counts only for what it adds to the rover’s height above where the climb began. The feature does not say on which day the rover crossed the mark, only that it did so recently, and the caption timing places it in late summer 2026, well before the October announcement. The distance the wheels have actually rolled across Gale Crater is a different, much larger number that NASA does not give in this release. On NASA’s mission page, the rover is listed as 14 years old and active, with the stated objective of determining whether Mars was ever able to support microbial life.

That climb has taken the rover through changing terrain. A NASA image release describes boxwork formations on the mountainside, spiderweb-like fractures that orbiters showed stretching 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers) and that are assumed to have formed as groundwater moved through large bedrock cracks in the ancient past.

Short uphill steps on the boxwork ridges

Individual climbs along the way can be modest. A July 2025 status roundup on Mars Daily, drawn from mission planning reports by Deborah Padgett, Lauren Edgar and Alex Innanen, records an 11-meter incline on sols 4,602 and 4,603 that took the rover to a ridge at the entrance of the boxwork region. A kilometer of total gain is built from many steps of that scale across more than a decade.

The Oct. 6 feature says the boxwork ridges opened the rover’s current extended mission. Its science case rests on the layer-by-layer record: NASA’s mission page says Curiosity “continues to explore the rock record” from a time when Mars could have supported microbial life, and each additional hundred meters of elevation puts younger rock under its wheels and instruments.

The yardang layer and the 2027 target

Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of JPL said in the feature, “The yardang layer looks out of place,” and added, “No one is sure exactly what created this layer, but one idea is it may be ash deposited by ancient volcanic eruptions.” One possible explanation for the sculpted shapes is that wind later stripped away material that had stopped settling on the mountain.

JPL’s earlier image of the Yardang Unit, taken Nov. 2, 2024, on sol 4,352, describes it as a layer in the uppermost reaches of the foothills at the base of Mount Sharp, differing from the lower layers in color, texture and the tilt of its beds. The unit has been in sight for nearly two years, which gives a sense of how slowly a rover covers ground.

Before then, the feature says, Curiosity will cross sulfate- and carbonate-rich layers over the next year or so, mineral signatures that point to the ancient surface drying out. Sometime in 2027, the team hopes to reach the base of the yardangs and use the rover’s robotic arm to collect data on them. The feature gives the 2027 arrival as a hope, not a scheduled date.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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